Bessie Head's Australian Interviews

Bessie Head’s international reputation – as novelist, short-story writer, essayist and chronicler – brought her to Australia in 1984, primarily for Adelaide’s Writers’ Week but also to visit Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart. In Adelaide, in February, she was interviewed by Suzanne Hayes of the College of Technical and Further Education. The following month, in Launceston, she was interviewed by Andrew Peek of the Tasmanian College of Adult Education. Both interviews are re-printed here: first, Peek’s, minimally re-edited (the original audio recording appears not to be extant), and second, Hayes’, edited anew from its original recording. Over a third of a century has passed since then, but Head’s voice rings out to us with a lamentably contemporary relevance: ‘choked’, as she tells Hayes, in a white-dominated South Africa, where she lived for the first twenty-seven years of her life, and then alienated in Botswana as a refugee and as a female writer of ‘mixed race’, ‘deprived all round’.

Bangla Dalit Womanist Speaks

Kalyani Thakur Charal is a cyclonic Dalit feminist and social activist. She wants to be known as a Dalit womanist who believes that writing is an act of resistance. She has four collections of poems, one autobiography and three collections of essays. She edits a cultural magazine, Nir. Her works are translated into English and many of them are on University syllabuses.This interview is the outcome of the meetings we have in Kolkata in last four months. The interview was originally conducted in Bangla.

‘a night where june and moon rhyme’

Dr Raphael d’Abdon is a writer, scholar, spoken word poet, editor and translator. In 2007 he complied, translated and edited I nostri semi/Peo tsa rona, an anthology of contemporary South African poetry. In 2011 he translated into Italian (with Lorenzo Mari) Bless Me Father, the autobiography of South African poet Mario d’Offizi. In 2013, he compiled and edited the collection Marikana: A Moment in Time. He is the author of three collections of poems, sunnyside nightwalk (Johannesburg: Geko, 2013), salt water (Johannesburg: Poetree Publishing, 2016) and the bitter herb (East London: The Poets Printery, 2018), and he has read his poetry in South Africa, Nigeria, Somaliland, Italy, Sweden and the USA. His poems are published in journals, magazines and anthologies in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Singapore, Palestine, India, Italy, Canada, USA and UK, he is South Africa’s representative of AHN (Africa Haiku Network), and he is a member of ZAPP (The South African Poetry Project) and IPP (International Poetry Project), two joint-projects of the University of Cambridge, UNISA and the University of the Witwatersrand, whose chief aims are to promote poetry in schools in South Africa, UK and beyond, and to instill knowledge, understanding and a love of poetry in young learners.This interview is conducted through e mails in the months of April-May 2020 when Corona virus ravished the world. We saw light through the wings of poesy. We reached out each other through questions and answers about poetry, life and the immediate.

Interview with Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca was born in Bombay to Prof. Nissim Ezekiel and Daisy Ezekiel. She was raised in a Bene-Israel Jewish family in Bombay, India.* She attended Queen Mary’s School, St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University and Oxford Brookes University, U.K. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English, American Literature and Education. Her career spanned over four decades in Indian colleges, American International Schools and Canada, teaching English, French and Spanish. She also held the position of Career Counsellor at the International School in India, where she taught Advanced Placement and other courses in English for sixteen years.She is a published poet. Her first book, Family Sunday and other Poems, was published in 1989, with a second edition in 1990. She has read her poems over All India Radio Bombay, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry India, SETU Magazine, Muse India and Destiny Poets, UK, to name a few. She has her poetry page at https://www.facebook.com/kemendoncapoetry.Kavita also writes short fiction. Her work is strongly influenced by her father’s work. (The late Nissim Ezekiel was an eminent poet, well-known in India and overseas). She lives in Calgary, Canada, with her family.This interview was conducted via emails in the rainy days of June 2020.

You can't outrun your shadow

E.M. Reapy was born in 1984 and raised in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, Ireland. She was educated at NUI-Galway, University College Cork, and Queen’s University Belfast where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing. In addition to other non-writing jobs, Elizabeth spent eighty-eight days working on an orange farm in the Australian Outback in order to secure a two-year visa to live and work in Australia – experiences that resulted in Red Dirt, her highly-acclaimed first novel. For Red Dirt, Reapy received the prestigious 2017 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, an award for a body of work by a young Irish writer showing exceptional promise. Skin, her second novel, also shares an Australian setting, among others.I met E.M. Reapy for the first time when we read together for the ‘Over the Edge’ Reading Series at the Galway City Library in 2018. On that occasion, Elizabeth read two beautiful short prose fiction pieces. Of course I had heard of her acclaimed first novel Red Dirt but had not yet read it. The next day I went into Charlie Byrne’s and bought a copy of the novel. A primary focus of my research through the decades has been on the literature of the Irish diaspora and I was excited to read Reapy’s exploration of the lives of the young Irish who had left home and moved to Australia, most on short-term visas, in the wake of the 2008 recession that caused the collapse of the Irish economy and, for all intents and purposes, bankrupted Ireland. I found Red Dirt to be terrific in every respect: beautifully realized, terrifying in places, always absorbing, and moving. Reapy’s second novel, Skin, while quite different from Red Dirt, is equally important in its intense exploration of how difficult it can be for a person to live in her skin. After Dr. Gillian Dooley has heard me deliver a paper on E.M. Reapy’s work at the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ), she asked me to interview Elizabeth for Writers in Conversation. The interview was conducted by email (January-April 2020).

An Interview with A.N. Wilson

Andrew Wilson, published as A.N. Wilson, is a British writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Beginning his career as an acclaimed comic novelist in the late 1970s, his work has since embraced literary biography, history, and novels that have moved beyond comedy to encompass faith and historical settings. In 2007 his novel Winnie and Wolf was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize; his most recent work is the acclaimed literary biography The Mystery of Charles Dickens.Nick Turner conducted the interview with Andrew Wilson by email in April 2020, focusing on the Andrew Wilson’s diverse writing interests, the work of Iris Murdoch, his new book on Dickens, the appeal of the Victorian age, and the writers that have inspired him in the past.

A Scholar, Poet and Critic

From the Archives: This interview was conducted during Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s visit to Flinders University in September 1994 and first published in the CRNLE (Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English) Reviews Journal in 1995. We are republishing it with Professor Lim’s permission, and with a postscript from Dr Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf to bring it up to date. 1995 Introduction: I first started reading Professor Lim's work in her role as a well-known critic of Malaysia and Singapore Anglophone writings, although she was better known as a poet. My brief encounter with Professor Lim during her visit to the CRNLE in conjunction with CRNLE's International Conference in September 1994, was both delightful and inspirational. To me, Professor Lim represents the many invisible tough and strong women in Asia particularly in Malaysia. She has gone through many conflicts and contradictions in her search for identity as a woman.

Writing Back

Shyamal Kumar Pramanik is an author on social and political values and an engaging writer of Dalit literature and movement. His works glitter with pain, angst and social good will. For him, writing is a commitment, social and political. Dalit literature is born out of ideological warfare. Pramanik is a socially committed artist with many works under his belt. All his works lead us to a better society based on justice, equality and fraternity.His collection of Dalit poetry titled Aguner Bornomala was first published in 2000 in Bengali. In 2019, it was published in English as Fiery Garland of Letters translated by Kalyan Basu (Gangchil, Kolkata). This collection of poems is rich with military images to change the society for good. These are mainly protest poems, protest against the age-old stereotypes in the Bengali caste pyramid.This interview was conducted via emails in the month of December 2019. We sat with the author a couple of times in a café in south Kolkata where we discussed his works and activism for the upliftment of the Dalits in Bengal.

An Interview with Abhay K.

Abhay K. (born 1980, Nalanda, Bihar) has published a memoir and seven collections of poetry. He is the editor of four poetry collections. His poems have been published in over 60 literary journals across the world including Poetry Salzburg Review. His poem-song 'Earth Anthem' has been translated into over 50 global languages. He received the SAARC Literary Award and was invited to record his poems at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.This interview was conducted through a series of emails in the month of September 2019.

Kamala Das

Kamala Das Suraiya (1934-2009), who also wrote under the pen name of Madhavikutty, was a bilingual writer from the South Indian state of Kerala and one of the most popular and most controversial poets of Indian English. As a major Indian poet of contemporary times, Das has attracted international attention by her bold and previously unarticulated expressions of womanhood. The recognition of Das as an Indian poet in English came with the PEN Asian Poetry Prize in 1963. Since then her poems have been published in many anthologies including the World Anthology of Living Poets (1973). Her initial poetry collections in English are: Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) and Tonight, this Savage Rite (Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy, 1979). Many other collections were published subsequently, incorporating both new poems and poems from the above collections.Some of them are: Collected Poems (1984), The Best of Kamala Das (1991), Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996), Encountering Kamala (2007) and a posthumous collection, Wages of Love ed. Suresh Kohli in 2013. Collected Poems won the Sahitya Akademi (New Delhi) award in 1984. Other works in English include her novel, Alphabet of Lust (1976), her autobiography, My Story, and short stories A Doll for the Child Prostitute (1977) and Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992).The initial part of this literary dialogue on Kamala Das between Usha Kishore and Dr B. Hariharan took place at the Institute of English, Thiruvananthapuram, where Usha was on a study trip from Edinburgh Napier University. The following is an email dialogue, incorporating the initial face to face discourse.