Marion Halligan
Literature Board, Australia Council
Abstract
I'm planning to talk to you today about being a novelist, that is, a person who finds and invents stories and offers them to the society she lives in. Why? you might ask. For what purpose? And I might reply, for your delight. Or perhaps, for your illumination. For modesty can hardly be a quality of novelists. And so I might say I'm offering you a mirror, to look at yourself in, sometimes perhaps a magic variety that shows you the past with the intention of making sense of the present. Possibly a crooked one, whose images may shock. But not one I hope that might shatter into dangerous fragments which will lodge in people's eyes and distort everything they see. Or I might say I'm trying out narratives to see if they fit, and giving you a chance to do the same.
Author Biography
Marion Halligan, Literature Board, Australia Council
The University of Sydney acknowledges that its campuses and facilities sit on the ancestral lands of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have for thousands of generations exchanged knowledge for the benefit of all.
Learn more