Maxine: To be totally honest, I would probably be completely self-important and appropriately writerly, and take a big fat empty notebook in which to immortalise the ironically beautiful misery of my parched, lonely, desperate, raw-crab-meat-eating existence. Stella: What book would you take with you to a desert island? I try to force myself to some days, though, because my general ambivalence can get me into some awful spots of bother. Stella: Do you care what other people think? We often forget that words are the most incredible and important invention of (wo)mankind. I love language, and the incredible things you can do with it. I love crafting stanzas and sentences, and hopefully making things sound beautiful. For me, the desire to add to the plethora of voices on the Australian experience, as well as to precipitate social change, is the driving force behind my work. I also have a background in human rights and anti-discrimination law. As a young black girl (of Afro-Caribbean descent) living in white-picket-fence Australia, I didn’t see myself in many of the stories we read at school. Maxine: I was born and grew up in Australia, in outer Western Sydney. I dare say they had some hand in shaping my work, particularly in those early cringe-worthy writing-wannabe stages. Maxine: My influences include young African-American writer Jesmyn Ward short-fiction giants such as Junot Diaz and J California Cooper Harlem Renaissance great Zora Neale Hurston and black science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson.Ĭloser to home, the existence, and ongoing successes, of Australian women writers of colour such as Alice Pung, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Anita Heiss and Ali Cobby Eckermann have greatly inspired me over the years.īack when I was studying undergraduate writing some fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to be taught by some of Australia’s great writers: Merlinda Bobis, John S Scott, and poet and verse novelist Alan Wearne. Stella: Which writers have shaped your work? Without her absolute support over the last five years, writing would have proven all but impossible. The only reason I’ve been able to attend is because Mum insisted I accept the invitation and took leave from her own job to camp out at my place looking after my littlies.

At the very moment I answer these questions, I’m sitting in a hotel room in Beijing, where I’m based this week for Australian Writers’ Week. Maxine: My favourite woman in the world is my mother… oh, it sounds trite and cutesy and unimaginative I know, but it’s the truth. The Stella Prize chats with Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of Foreign Soil

Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke