INTERVIEW: Tegan Daylight Bennett
It's the Sydney Writers Festival this week!
To celebrate, I'm running a series of short interviews with some of the guests over the course of the week.
To kick off the week, I'm interviewing Tegan Daylight Bennett who is not also an amazing writer but also my doctoral supervisor. Yes, lucky Tegan has to do her best to help me rein in my galloping imagination and actually put together an elegant and restrained piece of academic writing.
I'm hoping I don't make her suffer too much.
Here's the official festival biography:
Tegan Bennett Daylight is a fiction writer, critic and lecturer in writing. She is the author of three novels: Bombora, What Falls Away and Safety, as well as several books for children and teenagers, and the essays Solving Problems in Fiction and How Influence Works. She is at work on a collection of short stories, which have been published in many journals. She works as a lecturer in creative writing in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology.
Tegan is appearing at the following sessions:
• Missing in Action: Australia’s Literary Past
• The Art of the Short Story
• The Uncommon Reader
• In Praise of Short Form
• Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
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Click here for session times and venues..
What is your latest novel all about?
My newest book, which isn't finished yet, is a collection of short stories about the dark space between being a teenager and being a young woman; about sexuality and belonging, I guess.
How did you get the first idea for it?
The idea came when I was commissioned to write a short story for Charlotte Wood's collection 'Brothers and Sisters', about siblings. I found myself writing a story called 'Trouble' about an Australian girl living in London with her successful older sister and failing to make a go of it with English life and English men.
What do you love most about writing?
I like finishing. I like the feeling of understanding what it is I've been writing about; the feeling of drawing all the ideas together. That's one of the great pleasures of the short story.
What are the best 5 books you’ve read recently?
Georgia Blain's new book of short stories, 'The Secret Lives of Men'.
'The Fun Stuff' by James Wood.
'Cheever' by Blake Bailey.
'Leaving the Atocha Station' by Ben Lerner.
'Dear Life' by Alice Munro.
What lies ahead of you in the next year?
5. I'll be finishing my collection. I've got a few stories out this year, in Griffith Review and The Review of Australian Fiction. I'm expecting and hoping to get a few more out there before the year ends.
