Delia Falconer
Delia Falconer is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers. Her 2010 nonfiction work, Sydney, a personal history of her hometown, won the CAL Waverley Library Award for Literature and was shortlisted for other major national prizes including the New South Wales Premier’s History and National Biography awards. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Technology, Sydney. In 2018 her essay for Sydney Review of Books, “The Opposite of Glamour”, won the Walkey-Pascall Award for Arts Criticism.
All essays by Delia Falconer
The Opposite of Glamour
It is a tragedy for the planet’s wild creatures if they disappear: it is also a tragedy for us. If we lose all but our most domesticated companions, do we risk becoming something less than the humans we once were? Can we bear to live with just ourselves?’
Go ape: Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey
Only the Animals consists of ten stories arranged chronologically from 1892 to 2006, each of which is recounted by an animal that has died as a casualty of human conflict. Its engaging animal narrators include a young elephant from Mozambique, a bear that has starved to death in 1992 in the Sarajevo zoo, and even a horny, existentially questing mussel killed at Pearl Harbour.
A crushed thistle: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena hinges on the story of a Chechen villager who, over five days, tries to save a young girl from a Russian death squad. But its ambitions don’t stop at exhaustive research and breaking new fictional ground…
Shot dove’s feathers: The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers & Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
The critical response to Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds and Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – both of which deal with the Iraq war – has been notable for its constant and desperate refrain that a ‘great novel’ should emerge from this conflict.