Take Home Reading is a new short-form audio series for readers and writers – shining a spotlight on Australian writers with recently released books. In each instalment, you’ll be introduced to a writer, learn a little about what they’ve been reading lately, and hear a short reading from their latest work. Find it on the Wheeler Centre podcast.

In this episode we’re talking to Wayne Marshall about his debut short story collection, Shirl.

A daringly experimental collection, Shirl plays with white Australian masculinity, especially in suburban and rural contexts, in ways that are fantastical, absurd and comic.

'The collection is quite nostalgic, I guess. I started writing it... from a cancer diagnosis. But also, three months before that [happened], I’d become a father for the first time, so I was really looking back at the kind of world that I grew up in. And it was that crazy, strange, over-the-top Australiana. There’s something absurd about it that has always caught my eye.'

Wayne was programmed to appear in our Next Big Thing: Australiana Edition, which was unfortunately cancelled as part of our preventative measures to stem the spread of coronavirus COVID-19.

Shirl is out now through Affirm Press.

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