Watch our event on Ukraine at The Wheeler Centre.

Co-written with Juliet Rogers. Original title – The Rai Zone.

Reading Annie Ernaux at the time of Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine.

This chapter is a conversation with my friend of 40 years Alexandra who has just escaped from Kharkiv.

“On the Need for Aesthetic Wildness” + “Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy” in conversation with Namwali Serpell.

Thank you to Christos Tsiolkas for the introduction I’ll never forget. Thank you to Jean Bachoura and Flatwhite Damascus for the funniest and most unsettling “warm-up act”.

“My disbelief is not diminishing. Maybe because this feels like a gift of cosmic proportions. I wasn’t born into English, I am that ridiculous person who spent a near-decade writing a small book, I couldn’t even call myself a 'writer' till recently without cringing. My biggest thanks.”

“Many people whom the world calls “survivors” reject that word’s shadowy sense of moral elevation—how it implies that they (the still-heres) survived either because there was something morally special about them or because, by virtue of their experience, they grew an extra moral gear.”

Produced by the very brilliant Camilla Hannan.

“I don’t like books that are tightly choreographed – some of it just felt right – and I didn’t want to do the manipulative, conventional thing, but I did want the book to end in nothing but one person and another person, one person’s skin and another person’s skin, one person’s memory and another person’s. Nothing else. Just that.”

With Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy. Moderated by Anderson Tepper.

I am awe of these supremely smart, necessary, generous questions from Mireille Juchau.

Kim Hill, true legend.

A big thanks to Simon Warrender, the founder and director of the prize. And equally big congratulations to Alison Lester and Jamie Marina Lau.

Extract from Dangerous Ideas about Mothers, edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson, published in the Sydney Review of Books.

With Melinda Harvey, Lisa West McNeice, Vanda Hamilton and Sophie Bibrowska.

“We don’t need more dialogues, we need people who can help us think.”

With Sarah Krasnostein and Fatima Measham.

With Vahideh Eisaei, Khalid Warsame, Hana Assafiri, Sofija Stefanovic, Alice Pung, Sam Pang and George Megalogenis.

Speaking from inside the immigrant experience, catching times and spaces of immigration before they're squeezed, solidified into an assortment of familiar, 'tamed' narratives... A six-part audio work.

Sarah's fourth book Draw Your Weapons is really really worth reading. We are at The Wheeler Centre talking about (perma)war, resistance, looking and not looking, the 'civil contract of photography', limits of empathy.

The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. 

From a special 'Writing and Trauma' issue of Text Journal edited by Bridget Haylock and Suzanne Hermanoczki, October 2017.

I have a short piece on my family's experiences in Uzbekistan during WWII in this new collection.

Interview with Antony Funnell on our narrative fixation.

My extended review of Michael Green's and Andre Dao's (eds) They Cannot Take the Sky.

Brief review in Text Journal.

Thanks to Catriona Menzies-Pike for publishing this essay.