What inspired you to begin a writing career?

I’m not sure it was a conscious choice. The beginnings seem to have been love of language and curiosity about the Babel that surrounded me because of my Goan and Indian and family background. Travelling as a child born and raised here ‘back’ to India and imagining what that passage signified – culturally, geographically, but also historically. And, bearing witnessing to injustice. 

Of course there was also the power of reading… that sense of intimacy and being teleported to other worlds all made of someone else’s words, mind, and imagination. 

I had wonderful high school teachers who inspired and encouraged my juvenile plays and stories. That’s you, Mrs Lea and Miss Warren, wherever you are! One Mrs Lockwood got me hooked on Latin American magical realism and Indian literature in translation, and I recall quite vigorous debates with a Mrs Cogley about Yeats and Maud Gonne MacBride’s passionate intensity.

I did go on to study literature and writing at university and was lucky enough to have been taught by generous and gifted writers such as the poet Martin Harrison and novelist Glenda Adams, who also encouraged me to study for my Master of Fine Arts. The ecosystem was very different for a young writer then, and I was supported by the robust infrastructure of bodies like the Australian National Playwrights Centre and institutions like ABC Radio. 

At that time, an ardent reader of fiction, I had the audacity to think I might write a novel. 

What does it mean to you to be a recipient of the latest round of Creative Australia funding?

It is really gratifying to be backed in this very direct, practical way, especially as peers who make funding decisions can appreciate better than anyone the particular labour, resources, and skills necessary to this… I’ll call it a vocation. And the conditions of that labouring. As I have recently completed edits for my new book, a poetry debut, The Prodigal, the funding was a vital stepping stone for a new project.

Storytelling and literature are such subtle but powerful instruments for truth-telling and representation of marginal, even suppressed, experiences of the human and more-than-human world, and I try to harness this knowledge in my work. I also feel honoured that my work has been funded in light of the intersectional issues many writers face right now, including assaults on freedom of speech. 

I should add that when I don’t receive a grant (and I was rejected at the same time for a different one), I try to maintain a ‘gratitude-attitude’ for all the support I have received over the years, and do feel really glad knowing others will make something no doubt beautiful, worthwhile and meaningful despite all the austerity and precarity. I wish there was a Universal Basic Income for Australian writers, particularly to even things up for younger peers.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?

I wish I’d known that the concept of beginning, middle and end may elude one! And not to be too bothered by the deviations. I’m a writer who likes to play with form and to work back and forth between and even mix genres. I am also – for better or worse – driven less by mandates of a ‘career’ than the things I want to make. I hope accepting oneself and being honest about one’s strengths and weaknesses clears a path for, and facilitates a more authentic and wholehearted approach to, one’s work. 

I do believe that it is important to consider the writing vocation as something which is gifted to one, which one has an onus to cultivate, nurture, and share with the world, but at a very pragmatic level, I also believe we must be realistic about the risks and limitations of our industrial context; speak up, resist or even refuse hazardous conditions; provide solidarity to colleagues and, when necessary, take a sabbatical, rest and recharge; engage in both ‘effortless action’ and activism.

Which Australian authors/illustrators have been influential for you?

Ah, there are so many…  Alexis Wright, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Melissa Lucashenko, Tony Birch, Judith Beveridge, Gavin Yuan Gao, Omar Sakr, Gail Jones, Michelle de Kretser, Brian Castro, Rachel Ang and Shaun Tan are among my favourite contemporary writers and illustrators. Thinking of the first question, I remember being moved by the poetry of Judith Wright and Nancy Keesing. I recall one particular poem of Keesing’s, ‘Children’, in which the speaker watches her children at play in the Australian sea: 

Long-summer scorched, my surfing children

Catch random waves or thump in dumpers,

Whirling, gasping, tossed disjointed.

I watching, fear they may be broken –

That all those foaming limbs will never

Re-assemble whole, together.*

Between the comparative refrains “All under such a peaceful sky” and “All under such another sky”, the mother enacts sympathetic, perhaps even synaesthetic, witnessing, recalling televised images of children bombed, maimed, and killed during the Vietnam War. Keesing was a peace activist, industry advocate and patron, but reflecting on this poem again now, I wonder whether we can really sunder the concept of being ‘Australian’ from what is happening in ‘other’ lives ‘elsewhere’.

Passionately and intensely aware of the international context, throughout this last year I have given profound consideration to the meaning of my role as an Australian writer and human being under a continuous sky; an airspace transacted by the most lethal and sophisticated weapons systems humans have ever made or known; and what the incomparable Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called “the last sky” of catastrophic conditions which have been created for the Palestinian people. 

For me, Keesing’s lines resonate against a backdrop of ceaseless livestreamed scenes of children “tossed, exploded, / Torn, disjointed, like sticks broken, / Whose jagged scorching limbs will never / Re-assemble whole together”. Wrongfully detained or imprisoned, one cannot even see the sky; denied sovereignty, one is unable to collect rainwater to nourish one’s land. The weather and climate of our peace and others’ very survival and existence never seemed more interdependent. 

Why do you think it’s important to be a member of the ASA?

I believe in unions and unionised labour and the need to take collective action. Australian writers are incredibly hardworking, resilient and resourceful, but we need the backing and advocacy of the ASA because of the isolation and power imbalances inherent to our work, overwhelmingly as freelancers; for instance, the very well documented issues of underpay and poor remuneration which (relative to the ‘cost of living crisis’ unleashed by unbridled capitalism) never seemed worse. 

Let’s not even get started on AI impacts! It’s essential to have the ASA leading development and training opportunities and industry advocacy for policy and legislative reform to safeguard and enhance the gains the sector has made. I personally feel really grateful for the ASA’s support for me when facing some equal opportunity obstacles with my own work during this last year.