Southerly Journal Volume 75 No 2

The Naked Writer 2 hones focus on the poet and author: their processes, habits and ambitions, and the intersections of their lives and their work.

The issue opens with David Brooks’ tribute to the remarkable woman of Australian letters, Veronica Brady. The issue also contains: novelist Fiona McFarlane’s reflections on reading Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story; Kristina Olsson maps the writing of her acclaimed memoir Boy, Lost; short-fiction writer Hayley Katzen meditates on writing, revelation and privacy; Shirley Hazzard specialist Brigitta Olubas reads the marriage of Hazzard and biographer Francis Steegmuller as ménage troiswith Flaubert; and Joe Dolce presents his final interview with Dorothy Porter in which they discuss C. P. Cavafy. The issue also includes a wealth of fiction, poetry and reviews.

About the Author

David Brooks is a poet (Walking to Point Clear, Urban Elegies, The Balcony), novelist (The House of Balthus, The Fern Tattoo), essayist and writer of short fiction (The Book of Sei, Black Sea, etc. ). Before coming to Southerly, he had been, at different times, editor of Helix and The Phoenix Review, North American editor of New Poetry, on the editorial boards of Westerly, the Logbridge Rhodes Foundation and Canberra Poetry, and founder/editor of the Open Door Press.

His work has been widely anthologised, shortlisted for numerous awards (the Miles Franklin, the NSW Premier’s Award, the South Australian Festival Award, the FAW Christina Stead Award, etc.), and translated into many languages. He wrote his PhD in the 1970s on the poetics of Ezra Pound’s early Cantos, and has edited and/or worked closely with A.D. Hope, R.F. Brissenden, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand and many others.

He lives in the Blue Mountains and teaches Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. His latest publications are the novel The Umbrella Club and The Golden Boat, a collection of translations, with Bert Pribac and Teja Brooks Pribac, from the Slovenian poet Sre?ko Kosovel. He joined the editorial board of Southerly in 1991 and has been its managing co-editor since 1999.