Once more, it feels like the lull. The kind before a storm unleashes its fury. I’ve experienced this feeling too many times in the last ten years not to be afraid. One thing is certain: this toofaan will leave me feeling shipwrecked, then abandoned to float into oblivion. I’m waiting for mourners to arrive. I don’t want to see them. They didn’t console me ten years ago when my sister Parminder died, they won’t console me now.
It started again four weeks ago today, almost ten years after my first journey into the tempest. Both times, there was lots of activity. Tidying Mum’s lounge was like being a spring-cleaning DVD being played on fast forward. We cleared out furniture to make floor room where people could sit, removing every speck of normal life, knowing normality would never return. Carpets were vacuumed and white sheets spread on the floor on which the female mourners would squat to weep and wail while the men sat on the leather sofas. When the room had been cleared, we waited, feeling like we were caught in a nightmare, like voyeurs watching some sick reality show on TV, not knowing when the storm would reach us but certain it was coming.
At ten, the toofaan hit. Mum sobbed as her brother walked in. He was the first mourner to arrive. Perhaps he could console his widowed sister where we had failed. It was the day after Dad died.
Over three hundred people came that day: family, friends, foes and gatecrashers. Some had not been seen since they had come to mourn Parminder’s death ten years previously. I would have refused entry to some of them if I could. The day became a blur of men chatting; of wailing women chanting loud to show how much they cared, forcing tears from dry ducts then gossiping after a ‘respectable’ time. Of being a powerless eldest daughter feeling ignored because I wasn’t the son. Shedding silent tears. Anger. Making litres of tea that was never good enough. Fearing for Mum’s health. She had been hospitalised twice during the previous week because her heartbeat had dropped to dangerous levels, yet her blood pressure left her at risk of stroke.
Since then, life is a jumble of memories.
‘I’m going to the loo, Dad,’ or ‘I’m going for a sandwich,’ my sister Simran and I told him, taking turns to visit Mum downstairs in the hospital where Dad had been for seven weeks, frightened that news of Mum’s hospitalisation would make him deteriorate further. Although critically ill, it amazed medical staff that he was still alive. He wasn’t expected to survive the first night he was rushed into hospital, nor when he was taken in again after a few days at home. I should have refused to take him home. The Consultant had insisted Dad was well enough to leave hospital. He neglected to tell me that taking Dad home would shorten his life, only saying that he was ‘medically fit’ to go home.
‘Can you get here for 2.30 today? The Consultant wants a family meeting with us all,’ Simran asked during one of many unwelcome recent phone calls from her, starting five weeks previously to catapult me into this turmoil.
‘Hiya, alright?’ Even in my semi-awake, early morning state I had seen bad news hurtling towards me. ‘Yeah, just to let you know, Dad went into hospital yesterday. We thought we’d let you have a good night’s sleep before telling you.’ What if he’d died in the night?
I fumbled through my jewellery, looking for my charm necklace. It was like a comfort blanket, but one with hidden thorns. It began ten years ago with the gold box-link chain, the last ever present from my sister Parminder. She never saw it. I often wondered what I sent her for her last birthday, and where it was now.
My sister’s love, precious birthdays, and loss were woven into the chain. Bittersweet memories stung the eyes and stabbed the heart. After Parminder’s death I threaded a crystal heart onto it. Purple. Her favourite colour. The crystal was multi-faceted, like our relationship, but transparent like her love for me. Alongside it was a gold St. Christopher, a present from my sister Prabjot, a Christmas present from eight years ago – the year I almost met my Maker twice within six months. St. Christopher was to support me back to full strength to look after my baby daughter instead of leaving her motherless. Twice I had recovered from illness and escaped the clutches of Yam Raj, the greedy Angel of Death. There were other trinkets too, from family and friends, but nothing from Dad. He didn’t know about the necklace, or the charms.
‘Er, you better get here quick. Dad’s going really downhill. He’s struggling to breathe.’ I had been dreading this call for weeks.
‘Yeah, I’ll get there.’ I didn’t want second-hand information about Dad’s condition. Another frantic search. I still couldn’t find my necklace.
Sitting in a bleak beige room waiting for the doctors, I remembered a similar room from almost ten years before. Different hospital, same news.
‘We need to switch off her life support. There’s no hope of recovery, and if she did survive this accident, she would be severely brain-damaged – and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that,’ Dr. Stevens, the female Consultant playing the role of God patronised with an air of certainty that we wouldn’t want a disabled sister.
‘She’s a fighter. We can’t deprive her of the chance to fight back – we can’t just give up on her.’
Two days later the Consultant announced the life support machines were being switched off. So much for consulting with the family. On her last day, Paminder fought hard while we watched, while we wished for her to win this battle, and tried our best to soothe her while hiding our tears.
Then one day Prabjot left us too, perhaps unable to cope without her favourite sister Paminder.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Dad’s Consultant, Mr. Lee said, then destroyed all hope. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s no recovery from Liver Disease. The only option is a liver transplant. If we try a transplant now your father will die on the operating table.’
‘So basically, he’s going to die and there’s nothing we can do to help him?’ I didn’t want to ask this, but Mum needed to be told. She was in denial, planning for the day Dad would return home.
‘Yes. There’s no doubt about it.’
Mum wailed as reality sank in, looking crumpled in a corner of the room. She hasn’t regained her normal height since, bearing her grief like the burden of Atlas.
I learned lots about my parents since losing Dad. Mum lied daily, telling people that Dad died due to ‘inability to make blood’, fearing the mention of Liver Disease would make people think he was an alcoholic. I listened to her telling many different versions of this ‘truth’ to people who came to offer their condolences. The more disliked or distant the relative, the less honest her response was to their constant questions about whether Dad was ill, or their demands to know what happened.
Dad became multi-dimensional as people reminisced about old times spent together when they arrived in England, talking about shared beds, steel foundry work, where they lived and how they lived until their families came from India.
‘Your Dad could have been a movie star,’ Dad’s cousin smiled. ‘He was very handsome – the most handsome out of all of us!’
Why had they never made time to share these memories with Dad?
‘Aunt Bhanso told me about how she and Dad played together as kids. They used to go swimming in the stream and try to catch the fish that swam past!’ Simran, who Dad always called his baby, smiled as she told me this.
My own childhood memories surged back.
Manga’s stall of a myriad fruits in colours so bright they hurt my eyes and shapes I never knew existed. I could never walk past it without hearing ‘Amrita, come here!’ accompanied by beckoning gestures and huge grin visible despite his thick caterpillar-like moustache. He must have had x-ray vision because he could spot me and Parminder in the centre of a crowd as we tried to dodge him, embarrassed that he would never accept payment for what he gave us to eat, drink or take away.
‘No, no – tell me what you want.’ According to Manga, you were either hungry or thirsty. No was never an option despite us shaking our heads and
edging away. We had no money to pay him, and he knew it.
It never stopped him. Sometimes he squeezed oranges, perhaps picked that morning from local orchards, and watched us drink the fragrant juice in small, good girl sips when what we really wanted to do was gulp it down. When in season, long sugar canes were pressed through mangle-like machinery several times to produce something that looked like dirty dishwater but tasted sweeter than ambrosia.
My favourites were ripe bananas, sliced lengthways into two and left in their skins for taking easy nibbles from as we walked home. Sprinkled with pungent, nose-wrinkling black salt, they smelled like old boiled eggs but tasted yum!
‘Buy your fresh fruit here! Have some freshly squeezed fruit juice!’ All day, his hypnotic patter could be heard over the din of the bazaar. The bright hummingbirds coming to taste the nectar were never disappointed.
I didn’t know the name of the fruit I longed for most. The nobbly skin was the colour of strawberries in the delicate blushes before becoming scarlet ripe. Its elasticity indicated the freshness of the fruit and peeled away to reveal snow white flesh. I remembered that juice oozed with every bite, trickled through my fingers and dripped off my elbows by the time I’d had a few of the small fruits. The Indian sun soon dried it to syrup stickiness.
I couldn’t believe it when I found the fruit in England fourteen years after I came to live in England. I tasted one to be sure. With the first bite of lychee I became six years old again, somersaulting, giggling, holding the hand of the beloved sister who is in all my earliest memories.
Noses pressed against the window, we used to watch children playing in the street. It was never playtime for us. Mum feared sullied reputations, Teddy Boys – any boys. We were the only girls in the street for whom the rare English sunlight was strictly rationed. Even the other Indian girls were allowed out to play.
‘Let’s go, quick!’ I lifted the metal hook that stood between us and freedom. Heart racing, I pushed the door behind us, shutting it firmly as possible without a handle or a key, hoping Mum wouldn’t notice.
We played by the garages near our home, with stifled screams of joy and smothered smiles. If we played in the street, she would see us. We thought we were safe. Engrossed in play, we only noticed how dark it was after everyone else went home.
‘Come on Parminder, let’s sneak back in,’ I whispered. It was her name before lazy English neighbours changed it to Pam because they couldn’t be bothered to learn to pronounce her real name properly. The nick-name stuck for her lifetime. Holding hands, we crept to the back door. It was locked.
‘Now what shall we do?’ Tears ran in torrents down my little sister’s face.
Gripping hands we walked to the front door.
‘Where were you?’ The calmer Mum seemed, the more trouble was in store. She was very calm.
‘We were just here, Mummy Ji,’ I tried to tell her.
‘Get in!’ Her hiss was venomous. ‘How long were you out?’
‘N-not long, M-Mummy J-Ji,’ I stammered, petrified.
‘You’ve been gone for hours,’ she exaggerated. A habit she has not mellowed out of.
Quivering like lambs knowing they were walking into an abattoir, we followed her into the house. Mum didn’t stop until she got to the garden door.
‘Just wait until your father gets home!’ Dad would be less scary than she looked saying those words.
‘Sorry Mummy Ji.’ She ignored us.
‘I’m going to tell him – I didn’t know what had happened to you!’
Even at that age I had wondered why she had not come looking for us.
‘We didn’t hear you call for us,’ I explained, mouthpiece for my still silent, quivering sister.
‘That’s because I didn’t call you. Get out!’ She pushed us into the garden, locking the door behind us.
‘Please Mummy Ji, let us in, we’re really sorry Mummy Ji, we promise we’ll never go out again.’ We wailed and begged but our pleas went unheard.
‘Don’t cry!’ I hugged Parminder, wondering what we should do. It was dark. Our stomachs growled. There were no vegetables or tomatoes growing in the garden yet. I was the big sister now. I had to look after her.
‘Please, Mummy Ji, let us in,’ we both called in case she gave in. ‘We’re sorry!’
No response.
‘What are we going to do?’ Parminder held me tight.
‘We better go to sleep. She’s not going to let us in. I’ll make a bed.’
Grass cuttings would make a soft bed on the concrete patio. I spread them out for a mattress and blanket.
‘What are you doing?’ Mum flung the door open. The fury of lava flashing in her eyes, she gave us both the first sharp slap of many.
The sting of it brings me back to the crumpled woman who looks like she’s aged twenty years in four weeks.
‘I don’t want to live anymore,’ Mum sobbed a few days ago. The words dug like daggers. Mourners had come unaware it was the tenth anniversary of Parminder’s death. Three weeks short of a decade since her death, Dad had finally taken the place he felt should have been his, not Parminder’s, guilt-ridden that she had been travelling to visit him in hospital when she had the accident that killed her.
Trying to hide the memories of hospitals, funerals and sour words deep in the recesses of my mind, I wonder how Mum will cope with scattering Dad’s ashes, and the first of a lifetime of ‘firsts’ without him, starting with her birthday, five days before Father’s Day.
I go into my bedroom to search for my necklace yet again, undaunted by previous unsuccessful attempts. Success. It’s been hiding amongst my most precious jewellery.
The doorbell rings. I touch the necklace around my neck. Closing my eyes in silent prayer, I wonder if this journey will ever end. As the toofaan enters, my heart thumps like an orchestra of taiko drums.
Three Poems
Nick Lawrence
Barcarolle
Biographies
Peter Blegvad, born in New York, lives in London. Musician, illustrator, writer, broadcaster, psychonaut. He teaches at the University of Warwick.
Lauren Bliss is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is currently researching the representation of the pregnant body in the cinema. Her work has been featured in the journal Screening the Past, the anthology Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia, Catastrophe and in BAFICI press.
Elleke Boehmer is the author of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995, 2005), Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (2002) and Stories of Women (2005), and the biography Nelson Mandela (2008). She has published four novels, Screens again the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines, and Nile Baby (2008). She edited Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004), and the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and co-edited JM Coetzee in Writing and Theory (2009), Terror and the Postcolonial (2009), and The Indian Postcolonial (2010). Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010) is her first short story collection. Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.
Halina Boniszewska was born in the UK to Polish parents. She started writing fiction four years ago while still working as a senior commissioning editor with an educational publisher. Her fiction has been short-listed in a number of national competitions.
Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer and novelist. Between 1977-1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. She won the 1987 Victorian Premier's Award for fiction. Her series of books about the Heide circle includes The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004), Australian Gothic, A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) and Joy Hester (1983). The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier's Award for non-fiction. Her forthcoming book is Nest: The Art of Birds. She is a research fellow, Monash University.
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p; Professor Ed Byrne is the Vice-Chancellor of Monash University. His book of poems entitled Poems from the City: A London Interlude was published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2010.
Peter Carpenter has been a teacher of English and Creative Writing since 1980. He has published five collections of poetry and has a New and Selected Poems forthcoming from Smith Doorstop in 2012. The poems that make up his submission have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North and Speaking English (Five Leaves Press, 2007), as well as Catch (Shoestring, 2006) and After the Goldrush (Nine Arches, 2009). The last poem is dedicated to Amanda Carpenter.
Maryrose Casey is Director of the Performance Research Unit in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University. Her scholarly work focuses on race relations, indigeneity, cultural identity, nationalism, and the politics and reception of cross-cultural engagement. Her major publications include Creating Frames; Contemporary Indigenous Theatre (UQP 2004), Transnational Whiteness Matters. (Rowan Littlefield 2008) co-edited with Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Fiona Nicoll and Telling Stories Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Practices (2011 ASP). She has published award winning short stories and had performance texts produced.
Philip Caveney’s first novel, The Sins Of Rachel Ellis was published in 1976 and he went on to publish another 11 novels for adults including Speak No Evil and Burn Down Easy. In 2007, his first children's book, Sebastian Darke: Prince Of Fools was published in 20 countries around the world. His latest book for young readers, Night On Terror Island is available from all good bookshops. Philip is also a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and was based at Warwick University in 2010-2011.
Jane Commane was born in Coventry in 1983 and is a poet, editor and writing tutor. She is co-editor of Nine Arches Press and Under the Radar magazine. She has taught poetry in numerous community workshops in a variety of interesting settings, including at the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth and along the River Avon. Jane has also worked in museums education and in archive conservation since 2005. She has been previously published in Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry (Heaventree, 2006) and in various magazines, including Horizon Review, Tears in the Fence, Iota, Anon, Litter and Hand +Star.
Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario teaches fairy tale, fantasy and children’s literature at Monash University. She has published on a variety of subjects including Disney musicals, Harry Potter and book publishing with recent articles in the journals Marvels & Tales, Musicology Australia and Script & Print. Her current research interest is fashion in fairy tale.
Will Eaves is the author of three novels, The Oversight, Nothing To Be Afraid Of and This Is Paradise (forthcoming, 2012). His first collection of poems, Sound Houses, will be published later this year. For many years he was the Arts Editor of the TLS. He now teaches at the University of Warwick.
Elin-Maria Evangelista holds a PhD in Creative Writing. She is an assistant lecturer at Monash University and has been acknowledged for excellence in teaching. Elin-Maria has been an editor for ABES Routledge and a chief editor of Monash short fiction anthology Verge. A ‘Living Book’ at the Emerging Writers Festival for two years, she has also done many public readings of her prize-winning short stories, including at Desert Nights, Rising Stars writers festival in Arizona. Her academic research is to appear in a forthcoming publication on self-translation. She is Swedish and has a background as an actor and translator.
Peter Forbes is a writer with a special interest in the relationship between art and science. He edited the Poetry Society’s Poetry Review from 1986-2002 and his anthology The Picador Book of Wedding Poems will be published in January 2012. Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage (Yale University Press) won the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing. The paperback will be published in September 2011. He is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at St George's, University of London.
Maureen Freely was born in the US but grew up in Turkey, where her family still lives. Educated at Radcliffe College (Harvard University), she has spent most of her adult life in England. A Professor at the University of Warwick, she writes frequently in the British press on feminism, politics, and contemporary writing. She is perhaps best known for her translations of the work of the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk and for her campaigning journalism after he and many others were prosecuted for insulting Turkishness or the memory of Ataturk. Her sixth novel, Enlightenment (2007), is set in Istanbul, as is her work-in-progress.
Elsa Halling gained her BA from Warwick in her early forties, and after a career in teaching she returned to her alma mater in 2010 to study for an MA in Writing. She prefers the challenge of creating short stories, for both adults and children, because it demands the development of a strong plot and plausible characters within a limited space. She enjoys travel, so many of her stories have been inspired by the people and places she has encountered; her long experience in the classroom has given her a clear insight into the minds of young readers.
John Hawke is a Sydney poet and critic currently teaching at Monash University.
Angie Hobbs FRSA studied Classics at the University of Cambridge. After a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, she is now Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her chief interests are in ancient philosophy and literature, ethics and political theory, and she has published widely in these areas, including Plato and the Hero (Cambridge University Press: paperback 2006). She contributes regularly to radio and TV programmes, newspapers, websites and festivals. She is currently writing a book on heroism, courage and fame and producing a new translation of, and commentary on, Plato’s Symposium.
Gruff Jones spent his formative years, was educated, was bred, was universitied in Wales. Beyond that, he has been studying a Writing Masters at Warwick University, spending the last year or so in the good company of great people and better writers. He is currently working on a novel that may or may not become a black comedy about euthanasia based in Cardiff and other local areas. He hopes one day to do this scribing gig full-time. If not, there’s always wayfaring.
Sue Kossew is Professor of English at Monash University. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on postcolonial, Australian and South African literature. Her monographs include Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction (2004) and Pen and Power: A Post-Colonial Reading of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink (1996) and, as editor, Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville (2010), Re-Imagining Africa: New Critical Perspectives (2001, with Dianne Schwerdt) and Critical Essays in World Literature: J.M. Coetzee (1998). She has co-edited a volume of essays entitled Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction (2011).
Raj K. Lal started writing as a hobby which became a passion. It has led to meeting and working with exciting new and established writers from all over the world. She has performed her own work in many places. She co-wrote and acted in a play A Caribbean Christmas. Raj also writes short stories and has dabbled in poetry. Raj is currently working on her novel Batwara which is set in present-day England and India now and during the Partition era.
Nick Lawrence teaches American literature, world literature and critical theory at the University of Warwick. His poetry and prose have appeared in Grand Street, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Talisman, Ecopoetics and Mandorla, among other magazines. He is the author of Timeserver (Lift Press) and studies of Whitman, Hawthorne and Adorno.
Anna Lea studied her BA and the MA in Writing at the University of Warwick and now teaches screenwriting at the University. Anna has worked as an Audio Producer for BBC Audiobooks and as Curator of Short Film for the Hay Festival and the Bath Festival of Literature. She continues to work as a freelance writer. Her writing credits include a UK Film Council funded short film, Isaac, a teleplay for CBBC, Walking Tours for Lonely Planet and original audio content for BBC Audiobooks. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies.
Among Chandani Lo
kuge’s 14 books are the novels, Softly, as I Leave You (2011), Turtle Nest and If the Moon Smiled, and Moth and Other Stories. Awards include short-listing for New South Wales Premier’s Prize; Grant from the Literature Board of the Australian Council; and Residency at Chateau de Lavigny, International Writers’ Centre, Switzerland. As Editor, Oxford Classics Reissues series, Chandani has published 7 critical editions of Indian women’s writing. Guest-edited journals include Meanjin and Moving Worlds. Chandani is Associate Professor of English; Director, Centre for Postcolonial Writing; and Head, Creative Writing at Monash University. She migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka.
Anna MacDonald is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the School of English, Communication, and Performance Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. She has published numerous essays, including for the Edinburgh International Festival (2009) and the Venice Biennale (2007). She was an editor of the creative writing anthologies Verge 2010: Other Places and Verge 2011: The Unknowable (forthcoming).
Liz Manuel was born in 1981 and grew up in Ipswich and Bristol. She attended the University of Warwick where she read English and Creative Writing. In 2004 she received an Eric Gregory Award. She lives and works in Bedfordshire.
Adrian Martin is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies and Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory, Monash University. He is the author of five published books and the forthcoming A Secret Cinema (re:press 2012), as well as several thousand articles and reviews since 1979. His work on film and the other arts has been translated into over twenty languages. He is Co-Editor of the new online journal LOLA. A thirty-year web archive of his critical writing will be launched late 2011.
Michael McKimm graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. In 2010 he was British Council Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa, as part of the International Writing Program. A poem from his first collection, Still This Need, was selected for Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions, 2009). Poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Iowa Review, Magma, PN Review, The SHOp, Southword and an Irish writers special issue of Prairie Schooner (University of Nebraska). www.michaelmckimm.co.uk
David Morley has won fourteen writing awards and a National Teaching Fellowship. His latest collection Enchantment (Carcanet) was a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year. His creative writing podcasts are among the most popular literature downloads on iTunes worldwide. He writes essays, criticism and reviews for The Guardian and Poetry Review. He teaches at the University of Warwick where he is Professor of Writing. www.davidmorley.org.uk
Catherine Noske is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Monash University. Her interests lie mainly in contemporary representations of the Australian Gothic. She was an editor for Verge 2011: The Unknowable (forthcoming), co-edited Verge 2007, and has twice been published in Verge. She was awarded the prize for the best Creative Writing Honours thesis at Monash in 2008, and her short stories have been twice awarded the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers. The farmers she worked for in Brittany were much nicer than their fictional counter-parts.
Leila Rasheed is a graduate of and a part-time tutor on the Warwick MA in Writing. She writes children’s fiction: www.usborne.co.uk/bathsheba . She spends a lot of time in the Campania region of Italy.
Bruce Scates holds the Chair of History and Australian Studies at Monash University. He is the author of Return to Gallipoli (Cambridge University Press, 2006), A Place to Remember (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and a number of other historical studies of the memory of war. He is currently lead investigator on three Australian Research Council grants, including internal collaborations examining the history of Anzac Day and pilgrimages to WW2 traumascapes. Professor Scates is committed to new ways of exploring the past. ‘A Gallipoli Story’ is based on his forthcoming novel, Dangerous Ground, to be published UWA Press in 2012.
Ian Stewart is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. His awards include the Royal Society's Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, the Public Understanding of Science Award of the AAAS, and the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal. He has four honorary doctorates. His many books include Mathematics of Life, Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Why Beauty is Truth, and The Science of Discworld trilogy with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, appears frequently on radio and television, and does research on pattern formation and network dynamics.
Jennifer Strauss has had a long career as academic (mostly at Monash University), critic, editor and poet. Her collections of poetry are Children and Other Strangers, Winter Driving, Labour Ward, and Tierra del Fuego: New and Selected Poems. Represented in a number of anthologies of Australian poetry, she has herself edited the anthologies The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems and Family Ties: Australian Poems of the Family as well as The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore. Other publications include co-editorship of The Oxford Literary History of Australia, monographs on poets Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood and numerous articles and reviews.
Nicholas Tipple first graduated from Warwick University in 1999 with a MChem (Hons) degree in chemistry and returned ten years later to do the part-time MA in Writing. He spent the intervening period working in industry, latterly at Sellafield, Cumbria. He still isn’t sure how much the experience awakened his mind to the creative process, but the reprocessing micro-community has now become the centre-piece for his first novel. And it features the undead. At Warwick, he helped produce the 2010 MA anthology Onwards; project managed the 2011 edition, The Draft, and he is a co-editor of the Monash-Warwick collaboration, Verge 2011.
Dragan Todorovic is a writer and multimedia artist whose publications include eight books of non-fiction, poetry and fiction. He has worked extensively in print and electronic media, both in Serbia (where he was born) and in Canada (where he moved in 1995). Among other projects, he wrote and directed several radio-plays and theatre shows, two TV documentaries and hosted over 150 live TV shows. The Book of Revenge, his first work in English, won The Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Diary of Interrupted Days, a novel, was short listed for several awards, including Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Amazon First Novel Award. He has been living in the UK since 2005. www.dragantodorovic.com.
George Ttoouli is an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. He co-edits Gists and Piths with Simon Turner, an experiment in poetry e-zining and is Editor of Polarity Magazine UK, a surrealist experiment in bankruptcy, which won the 2011 Saboteur Award for best independent literary magazine. His debut collection of poetry is Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009), described as “a compelling case for the power of satire, dark comedy and surrealism in contemporary experimental / linguistically innovative poetry” (Steve Van-Hagen, Eyewear). He is about to embark on a doctorate in ecopoetry.
Ndaeyo Uko is writing a creative nonfiction book on the intrigues of the humanitarian catastrophe that confounded the world during the oil-fuelled Biafra war (1967-1970). This anthology piece is an excerpt from his Biafra project. His book, Story Building: Narrative Techniques for News and Feature Writers (2007), received glowing endorsements from leading writers and narrative scholars, including experts from Harvard University and the New York Times. Dr Uko’s awards include the British Chevening Fellowship, the Hubert Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar Award, and a Monash University postgraduate scholarship to complete his PhD in Creative Writing.
Robert J. C. Young has occasionally published poetry since he was a teenager. In writing prose, he is interested in breaking down barriers between the creative and academic to develop new genres that belong to neither. The ‘writings’ section of his website hosts other different kinds of writing, including some poems. His academic publications, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West; Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race; Postcolonia
lism: An Historical Introduction and The Idea of English Ethnicity are among the most influential books in postcolonial studies. Robert is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 33
