Emily Maguire from Sydney, Australia has been writing commentary for the Sydney Morning Herald with sharp and personal observances on race, religion, abortion, teenage life and all things worth opining on for a few years now. She’s a young voice coming out of seemingly nowhere with significant ideas and a completely arresting linguistic savvy. She recently blew minds with her first novel Taming the Beast (Brandl & Schlesinger, Australia) which
involves itself with the brutal seduction of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by her English Lit teacher. The sex scenes in this book are graphic and constant yet never gratuitious or purposefully titillating. But they are shocking and the trajectory of the girl’s life, particularly after being abandoned by the teacher, who we find out is a repressed sadist, constitutes an intense page-turner. The book rips like a contempo crime noir thriller. It’s underlying vibe is one concerned with psycho obsession brought on by animal physics as exacted by intellectuals who you’d think could save themselves by their own wisdom. But, alas, fuck that, these people are dooooomed. A crazy read that has been zonking OZ and translated into German, Italian, Polish and Russian and ready to be published Stateside right about now by Harper Perennial. A wicked ride.
Byron Coley & Thurston Moore – Arthur Mag
Kathleen Mitchell Award 2006 - Special Commendation
Judges Comments:
A powerful novel about desire, love and lust. Often confronting and uncomfortable to read, this novel is a kind of grunge mix of Nabokov’s Lolita, the erotic mayhem of the Marquis de Sade’s narratives and the self-destructive passion of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Obsession, delusion, abandonment and perversion are never easy to portray, but Emily Maguire has managed to wrestle the beast to the ground and, if she has not tamed it, then she has given us some insights into both its beauty and its terror.
