On human and non-human people: an interview with Jane Rawson

Abstract

Australian fiction writer Jane Rawson writes about strange but familiar worlds. Her books and stories are relentlessly inventive, disruptive but tender and funny, and thoroughly thought-provoking. Her debut novel, A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (Transit Lounge, 2013), was shortlisted in the science fiction category for the 2013 Aurealis Awards and won the Small Press Network’s ‘Most Underrated Book Award’. This was followed by two books in 2015, a novella, Formaldehyde (2015, winner of the Seizure Viva la Novella competition), and the nonfiction work The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change (Transit Lounge, co-written with James Whitmore). Her novel From the Wreck, the main topic of this interview, was published by Transit Lounge (Melbourne) in 2017 and by Picador (UK) in 2019. It won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Barbara Jeffries Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. This interview took place before a live audience at Imprints Booksellers in Hindley Street, Adelaide, in 2018, and was updated via email exchange between the interviewer and Jane Rawson.