“I don’t want to be a tourist in my own country”: An interview with Michelle de Kretser

ABSTRACT

In this interview conducted via Zoom in Sydney in November 2020, the Sri Lankan-born Australian fiction writer Michelle de Kretser talks about her identity as an immigrant writer. In particular, she discusses her novels in a postcolonial context. De Kretser also talks about the way that women’s writing is flourishing in Australia. She sees the contemporary world as characterized by movement and travel, and notes the privilege on which tourism is based. She explores the way in which her work attempts to show the cultural diversity in Australia in order to overthrow the stereotyped, mistaken vision of it as a white country. Finally, de Kretser speaks of her interest in playing with the novel as a literary form and why she adopted a so-called “gimmicky” flip format for her latest novel, Scary Monsters, published in 2021.

KEYWORDS:

• Michelle de Kretser
• migration
• multiculturalism
• Asian Australian
• travel
• diversity
• literary form

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Michelle de Kretser (2019) has published a study of the Australian American author Shirley Hazzard.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yang Chen

Yang Chen is a doctoral candidate at the Australian Studies Centre in the School of Foreign Languages at East China Normal University, Shanghai and a one-year visiting student (2020) at the University of New South Wales (Arts, Design & Architecture), Sydney. Her research focuses on Australian literature and foreign women’s literature. She has recently published articles in Foreign Literature and Art (2019) and New Perspectives on World Literature (2021) in China. She has been working on a comparative literature study of Michelle de Kretser and Shirley Hazzard and has completed her doctoral thesis “Mobility and Identity in the Travel Writings of Shirley Hazzard and Michelle de Kretser”.