"The Inland Sea came out in 2020. And in that period as I was writing it, I would keep noticing each year would be 'the worst on record.' Like the hottest day on record, the most fires on record. And there was a sort of strangeness to having written the book in a period of Black Summer fires that burned for nearly six months and just decimated huge sways of land. In 2020, I had gone back to the Sydney Writers Festival and spent some time with family, and then just got stuck for months in the COVID lockdown. And I would go on runs into these stretches of bushland that had been burned, and I would make my way through these skeleton forests. The trees were black. The soil was black. There was no color at all. No bird song. No insects. And it was March. There should have been so much wildlife. It was deeply eerie."

Madeleine Watts is an Australian writer based in New York. Her first novel The Inland Sea was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her essays and stories have been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, The Guardian, The White Review, and The Paris Review Daily, among others. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University in New York. Her second novel, Elegy, Southwest, is forthcoming.

www.madeleinewatts.com

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667704/the-inland-sea-by-madeleine-watts

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