Declan Fry

911 Lonely: Call Me Call Me Call Me
On James Nguyen’s ‘Open Glossary’ (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
No name for the country 名のない国
Between the Diagnosis and the Death (poetry collaboration with Craig Santos Perez)
Digression, Transience and the Desire to Know and Be Known
Bonny Cassidy m̶o̶n̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶, Balsam Karam: The Singularity, Jeanine Leane
Octopus 23: The Field (Memo Review)
On Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
slow departure / uncertain imperative (poem, Plumwood Mountain Journal)
On Alexis Wright
‘It Came From the Closet’ and Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (ABC, October best reads)
‘Singing the accumulated histories of our continent': Eight must-read books by First Nations' writers
On JM Coetzee’s ‘The Pole’
Best of 2023: Javier Marías, John Morrissey, and Giorgio Agamben
ABC Best of November: Rebecca Ruth Gould’s ‘Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom’ and Jackie Wang’s ‘Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood’
‘Colonial issues reveal themselves as the daddy of them all’: on Mirandi Riwoe’s ‘Sunbirds’
On Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (ABC podcast recording)
On André Dao’s ‘Anam’ (The Monthly)
Killing in the name
On Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X
Claire Dederer, Monsters
On Martin Amis ‘Inside Story’ (ABR, review)
On Ellen van Neerven’s ‘Personal Score’
Faber course: Exploring the imaginative interchange between reader and critic (with Anwen Crawford & Ellen O’Brien)
On Madelaine Lucas, ‘Thirst for Salt’
Galang 02, and Brigitta Olubas’ biography of Shirley Hazzard (ABC November best reads)
Nothing Remembered and Everything That Was playlist
Another Australia pre-order
Cast and caste: When Hollywood plays the race card
But for a Moment There Were Your Words, Forcing All Forms of Life Inside of Me, and the Parallax View, and the Figure, and the Form
Time is the Raw Material: On Lisa Hsiao Chen’s ‘Activities of Daily Living’
Americano Sal (short story, The Guardian/Griffith Review)
On Sheila Heti and Peter Boyle
Morbid Symptoms (short story, Liminal)
Poetry | The forests died back last year …
The migrant experience - survivor guilt and a variety of humiliations (On Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Root & Branch’)
Old man yells at cloud: Christos Tsiolkas turns to autofiction
On Pirooz Jafari’s ‘Forty Nights’
Best New Books in August
On George Haddad’s ‘Losing Face’
Diana Reid’s 'Love & Virtue’ and the temptation of moral posturing
Speaking with Maleeka Gazula about Sydney Writers Festival (2:20:00 onward)
Best New Books in July
Best Books of June (ABC)
Yassmin Abdel-Magied reckons with her psychic wounds
Best Books of May: Paul Dalla Rosa and Sarah Holland-Batt (ABC)
Killing the Cop in your Head
On Omar Sakr’s ‘Son of Sin’
Best New Books in March: Yoko Tawada, Adam Ouston
On Jessica Au, ‘Cold Enough For Snow’
On ‘Growing Up in Country Australia’
On Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark (Best New Books in September)
The Best Books of 2021 (ABC Arts)
Another Day in the Colony by Chelsea Watego review – a fierce manifesto for First Nations to flourish
On SJ Norman’s ‘Permafrost’
“A melancholy man with eyes on the political machinery”: on Noel Pearson
Looking back through a leftist lens to Australia’s tipping point
The final offering from one-of-a-kind writer Gerald Murnane
25 best books of 2021 (Guardian Australia)
Best Books of 2021 (Australian Book Review)
The emptiness behind the mask: Sean Kelly’s life of the PM
On Thomas Keneally
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang
The best new books to read in November (Ida Vitale, ‘Byobu’)
The Suffering Artist: Jonathan Franzen’s mythologies
Max Easton: The Magpie Wing
On Antoni Jach
On Jennifer Down’s ‘Bodies of Light’
In conversation with Anwen Crawford
Critical Condition: Bernadette Brennan & Declan Fry
2022 Stella Prize interview
On Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle
On Don DeLillo’s ‘The Silence’
University of Queensland Press interview
On Sarah Walker’s ‘The First Time I Thought I Was Dying’
Tender and mischievous, Paige Clark makes a striking debut
Faber Writing Academy Course: Writing About Books
‘Negative Reviews, Positive Vibes and Being a Forever Reader’ (Kill Your Darlings)
On Anwen Crawford’s ‘No Document’
On Jennifer Mills’ “The Airways”
The best new books to read in August
On Amani Haydar’s ‘The Mother Wound’
The Gospel of Stan Grant
PR buzz and a Hulu adaptation: is this the next big novel?
The Afterlives of Art: On David Malouf and the end of the Sydney Writers’ Festival
Interview with Billy-Ray Belcourt
Vanessa Berry takes a diffident peek at the animal world and herself
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau – a dystopic portrait of post-industrial alienation (Guardian)
Justice for Elijah or a Spiritual Dialogue With Ziggy Ramo, Dancing
Why people smugglers are not so criminal
The best new books to read in July
Who is the real monster in Briohny Doyle’s second novel, Echolalia?
On Ramona Koval ‘A Letter to Layla’ (SMH)
Walking Wurundjeri Country (Meanjin)
Kavita Bedford, ‘Friends & Dark Shapes’ (The Guardian)
On Fiona McGregor, ‘Buried Not Dead’
On Andrew Pippos ‘Lucky’s’ (The Saturday Paper, review)
On Cham Zhi Yi ‘Blur by the’ (Cordite)
On Sydney Writers’ Festival Opening Night
At home with Declan Fry (The Garret: Writers on writing podcast)
Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen – a scalpel through Australian myths
Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now
The ABR Podcast: on ‘Fire Front’
On Aaron Smith ‘The Rock: Looking into Australia’s “Heart of Darkness” from the Edge of its Wild Frontier’ (SMH, review)
Bran Nue Dae (poem)
On Philip Salom ‘The Fifth Season’ (SMH, review)
On Fiona Murphy, ‘The Shape of Sound’
On Krissy Kneen
On Luke Stegemann
The Garret: Writers on writing podcast
On the ‘Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry’ (SMH, review)
On Yhonnie Scarce & Judy Watson’s ‘Looking Glass’ (The Saturday Paper, art review)
On Murray Bail
‘Domestic Abuse and Writing Through the Unspeakable’: on Carmen Maria Machado, Jess Hill, and Ellen van Neerven (KYD, essay)
‘Who’d want to be a witness when it just means more trauma?’ (SMH)
‘On the road again and again’: On Barry Divola
On ‘Antipodean China’ (The Saturday Paper)
Interview with Claire G. Coleman (Sydney Writers’ Festival)
‘The fate of non-human lives in days of disintegration and distress’ (SMH/Age, review)
Best Books of 2020 (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald)
Best Books of 2020 (Australian Book Review)
On Kylie Maslen ‘Show Me Where it Hurts’ (SMH, review)
On Anna MacDonald ‘A Jealous Tide’ (KYD)
Djab Wurrung embassy
On Max Allen ‘Intoxicating’ (SMH)
‘I was the Only Blak Queer in the world’: on Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (Overland, essay)
On ‘Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today’ (ABR)
On Tara June Winch ‘The Yield’ (Sydney Review of Books)
Capital Writes White (Overland, essay)
Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: Caring for Country and Community During a Pandemic (Meanjin, essay)
On Michael Mohammed Ahmad ‘After Australia’ (ABR)
Kill Your Darlings August culture picks
On Jock Serong’s ‘The Burning Island’
On Bem le Hunte’s ‘Elephants with Headlights’

About

Declan Fry is a writer, essayist, and poet. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, in 2020 he was engaged as a critic for The Sydney Morning Herald/Age newspaper, awarded the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship, and a Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Award for memoir. His work has appeared in Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, Liminal, Overland, Australian Book Review and elsewhere.

He currently lives on unceded Wurundjeri country with his partner and their cat, Turnip.

You can follow him (and Turnip) on:

Twitter | _DeclanFry
Instagram | _declanfry
Contact: frydeclan@gmail.com

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