Shirley

Research background In the 20th and 21st Century Western context, sexuality, gender, class, and the city are materially and conceptually entangled, and the changing nature of this entanglement is both theorised – for example, by David Halperin and Olivia Laing – and explored creatively as something whose nature shifts through time in the novel, in recent years by writers as varied as Rachel Kushner, Diana Reid and Ling Ma. This research in creative writing seeks to extend, vary, recombine, and satirise these traditions against a backdrop of global climactic and epidemiological devastation, exploring the bodily, social and emotional potentials of contemporary novelistic conventions. Research contribution This research contributes to documenting the way Melbourne experienced COVID: Books and Publishing said Shirley ‘marks the beginning of the great remembering’. Beyond this, it contributes to understandings of how narration which is devoted to representing language and cognition might also show – sometimes through gaps or change in the novel over time – emotional, biological, and social forces. Through contrasting real-world events (such as the Australian bushfires of 2019 and COVID) and conventions of voice, tone and structure, it locates urbane characters, especially gay men and straight women, who we encounter in literary and human/gendered forms, in embodied and non-human contexts. Research significance Development of this research was supported by Cat 2 funding from Creative Victoria. The novel was published by Penguin Random House Australia and received reviews in Sydney Review of Books, Australian Women’s Weekly, the Age/SMH, Herald Sun and others; it was highlighted as a significant title by Amazon, Harpers Bazaar, the Australian and others; it led to national panels, profiels and interviews. Reviews in The Guardian, Australian Book Review and others used it as an occasion to analyse my work as a body of creative research that has developed over 3 titles.