Storied Lives – The Novella Project V

Edition 58

Storied Lives – The Novella Project V

Buy $27.99

Published 7th November, 2017
ISBN: 9781925498424
Extent: 264pp
Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

Every life offers a unique story – but some lives stand out so distinctly they leave their mark on the world. How do some people make such a difference – and trigger change both at large and close to home?

Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives – The Novella Project V focuses on people who have effected a change in the world. It looks at the lives of others – real and imagined – that have created a narrative that resonates.

Their stories, personal, political, scientific or cultural, help map change, and illustrate how an individual life can coalesce with history to leave an enduring mark. For the first time, Griffith Review‘s Novella Project combines both fiction and non-fiction in order to highlight the rich diversity of writing talent in Australia.

Contributors include Kristina Olsson, Laura Elvery, Chris Somerville, Frank Moorhouse, Cassandra Pybus, Biff Ward, Krissy Kneen and Heather Taylor Johnson.

Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives is published with the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and Australia Council for the Arts.

In this Edition

Stories we tell ourselves

‘NATIONS TELL THEMSELVES stories,’ the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote recently. ‘They are not fully true, they are often bitterly contested and they change over time. But they are powerful: they underlie the necessary fiction that is “us”. And at the moment it is...

By Julianne Schultz

Journey through the apocalypse

HALF BURIED IN the sand, uprooted stalks of kelp are like splashes of dark blood against the white quartzite, ground fine as talc. In the translucent shallows, tendrils flounce lazily as the water gradually turns to turquoise then a deep Prussian blue at the...

By Cassandra Pybus

How to preserve a turnip

THE GIRL WAS born to snow. Her mother, hot with the pain of a sideways birth, stumbled into the virgin drift and squatted, barefoot and angry as a nest of wasps. Her screams echoed off the white face of the mountains and back across nearby Trbinc Hill.

By Kris Kneen

Effeminacy, mateship, love

THIS YEAR – 2017 – is the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Australian writer Henry Lawson. Lawson scholar Paul Eggert, in his book Biography Of A Book: Henry Lawson’s While The Billy Boils (Penn State University Press, 2012), writes, ‘Lawson, at fifty-five,...

By Frank Moorhouse

Lake Misery

1 THE FIRST THING that happened was a woman came into the ranger station while I was on the phone to two brothers, telling them they couldn’t bring their dog into the park. They had me on speaker and were both talking at the same...

By Chris Somerville

In 1974

SUE SHIT, DAVID SAID. Look at this! Julia Gillard was announcing the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The whole country wanted those sinister priests to be held to account. I figured she’d dressed for the moment: navy jacket over discreet white top, fine...

By Biff Ward

Wingspan

Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn was born in Hobart in 1948. She spent her childhood and teenage years in Launceston, and later studied in Melbourne, the UK and the US. In 2009, along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize...

By Laura Elvery

Shell

For the second instalment of our summer of Sunday-reading, Griffith Review celebrates Kristina Olsson's 'Shell', an excerpt from her 2018 novel by the same name, and published in Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives – The Novella Project V as part of the 2017 Griffith...

By Kristina Olsson

The subject beneath the object

In 1990, a group of medical researchers theorised that Vincent van Gogh suffered from Ménière’s disease, rather than epilepsy. Ménière’s disease is an inner-ear disorder, causing vertigo and a fullness of the ear that leads to constant noise – something equivalent to listening to a...

By Heather Taylor Johnson