infinite secrets of the river Last week, mostly to somehow productively distract myself from the pain unleashed within my circle of Jewish friends and Lebanese friends by the terrorist attack in Bondi, I read Kate Grenville’s Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place (2025). In many ways, Grenville’s reflections in this memoir are essential to […]
Touched
Touched: A small history of feeling Like most writers, I’m always half terrified and half crazy-brave, wanting to throw my heart at the world, and wanting to run away from it. It’s this kind of tension between fear and desire that keeps us fronting up to the page, to attempt to say something meaningful, to […]
Ten years of gratitude
Ten years of gratitude Anniversaries aren’t really my thing. I often forget the date Deano and I were married or the precise year my mother died. If it wasn’t branded into my identity, I’d forget my birthday too. But the marking of a decade of post-kidney transplantation life is significant, a weight of remembrance, a […]
No goddess in this machine
No goddess in this machine I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how artificial intelligence is going to mimic the essence of the human behind the words of a story. Our voices, even in text, are kind of like fingerprints. They’re unique. Not only in the ways we place one word after another, but in […]
huge news for a little book
huge news for a little book I am stoked to bursting to announce that my novella, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room, is a winner of the inaugural Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize. This prize is awarded to prose works of between 20,000 and 40,000 words in length, and for writing that is ‘imaginative and challenging’. Set […]
Rats, Lovely Rats
Rats, Lovely Rats I can’t think of the Irish diaspora without thinking of rats – rats scurrying onto ships, scurrying over each other to get away from the places and people that had rendered their lives worthless. Economic migrants, to be sure. Colonists, undoubtedly. But economic migration can be as much a matter of life […]
Kim Kelly 