Amanda o'callaghan

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"My favourite short story           collection of the year...utterly brilliant."​
​        Simon Savidge    ​

    









​"This is one of the most substantial and memorable collections of short fiction by an Australian writer that I have read for a very long time.”                    
Kerryn Goldsworthy

Brisbane

5/15/2017

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I'm re-reading Josephine Rowe's short story collection, called Tarcutta Wake (UQP, 2012). The first piece in it, "Brisbane", remains one of my favourite pieces of flash fiction. In about 500 words, Rowe manages to create an unforgettable panorama of grief and hope - a young mother driving north to Brisbane with her two young sons. On the run? Or breaking free? I must have read it twenty times over the years and each time I see something new. It's haunting and beautiful. And I love the long first line: "And she had this way of swivelling her head round, like an owl to talk to you as she drove, except not an owl because the skin of her neck creased up in folds and she looked so old when that happened, though she wasn't, not then, and Luke would lean over and say, Watch the road, Mum."
​
I haven't read her new(ish) novel, her first, yet. It's called  A Loving Faithful Animal (UQP, 2016).
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    Author

    Amanda O'Callaghan is an award-winning writer of short stories and flash fiction. She has been published and won awards in Australia, Ireland and the UK.

    Debut collection,
    ​This Taste for Silence
    ​University of Queensland Press (UQP, 2019)


    TWITTER: @ocallaghanac
    EMAIL: ocallaghan.ac@gmail.com

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    I am honoured to have been one of three recipients of a Queensland Writers Fellowship (2016). Congratulations to my fellow awardees: Trent Jamieson and Pamela Rushby

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