Another year ends, and I can’t say it’s been the best I’ve had. But there are always highlights, and those are what I hope I’ll remember of 2024.

Ireland

Ireland has been a big part of my year. I finally made it to a many-times-delayed residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan, which was hugely productive creatively and pure joy personally. I also spent some time in the county town of Monaghan, where part of my work-in-progress is set, and driving around the Killeevan area with some wonderfully knowledgeable local taxi drivers. Along the way, I met several local historians who were generous with their time and knowledge.

I’ve read a lot of Irish fiction during the year, and it’s no surprise that Claire Keegan is once again among my favourites of the year. How good is So Late in the Day! An online residency run jointly by Varuna here and the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin introduced me to seven novelists, Irish and Australian, who are producing exciting new work and whose published work has blown me away.

Revered Irish novelist Edna O’Brien died this year, and I realised that, apart from a short story studied at university, I was unfamiliar with her work. So I embarked on the ‘Country Girls’ trilogy, novels that have also been categorised as memoirs: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in their Married Bliss (1964) (this last title deeply ironic). I loved O’Brien’s portraits of ‘ordinary’ girls and young women and the city and rural social worlds of mid-twentieth century Ireland. O’Brien broke new ground in writing about matters of sex and the oppression of women, and these novels were considered so scandalous at the time that they were banned by clergy and the Irish Censorship Board.

And, finally, I’ve spent the year dwelling in the heart and mind of an Irish character whose voice I hope might find its way into print someday.

Vale Brenda Walker

I was deeply shocked and saddened by the recent death of WA novelist Brenda Walker—a terrible loss not only to her family, friends and colleagues but to the writing and reading community.

Brenda Walker’s many achievements as a writer included the historical novel The Wing of Night, one I have always admired for its focus on the women left behind when their men went to the Great War. Her other novels were Crush (debut, and winner of the TAG Hungerford Award), Poe’s Cat and One More River, and many writers are familiar with The Writer’s Reader: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Poetry, which she edited. Her memoir of a journey of recovery from breast cancer, Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, won many awards.

For me, she was one of a group of women writers I looked up to from my earliest days as a reader of Western Australian literature, and whose work taught me much about writing and that there was value in women’s stories. Vale Brenda Walker.

Online…

One of the literary news stories of the year was Richard Flanagan winning, and declining, the $97,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for his non-fiction book Question 7: story here.

I was delighted to read that Gail Jones, one of my favourite authors, was granted the Creative Australia Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature: story here.

I also listened to this excellent interview with Gail Jones, in which she talks about her award-winning novel Salonika Burning and imagining the past: link here.

A fabulous initiative by Australian authors, headed by Paddy O’Reilly, saw every Australian federal MP and senator gifted a ‘Summer Reading’ pack of five books that shed light on the complex history of the Israel–Gaza region. I’m planning to use the list of titles myself to help me understand the issues: story here.

And finally, I have been unable to do much in the way of blog posts this year, but I’m pleased to have featured an interview with WA author Katrina Kell on her fascinating historical novel Chloe, and the announcement of the winner of this year’s City of Fremantle Hungerford Award, Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, whose bilingual hybrid-genre manuscript የተስፋ ፈተና / Trials of Hope will be published by Fremantle Press in 2025.

Happy New Year, everyone!