Compulsive Reader Talks

Jessica Au’s first novel, Cargo, was published by Picador in 2011 and was highly commended in the Kathleen Mitchell Award for a writer under 30. She is the former deputy editor of Meanjin, and is currently an associate editor at Aeon. Her new book Cold Enough for Snow won the inaugural Novel Prize and was published by Giramondo, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions in February 2022, and translated into fifteen languages. She joined us today to read from and talk about Cold Enough for Snow. During the interview we talked about such things as the way she conveys interiority, about the mother-daughter relationship in her book and the philosophic tension between the way they see the world combined with the tenderness that exists between them, on elegy, perception, ekphrasis, memory, migration and many other key themes that this beautiful book encompasses.   Cold Enough for Snow (and more information about the book) can be found here: https://giramondopublishing.com/jessica-au-a-note-on-cold-enough-for-sn