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Drusilla Modjeska

Drusilla Modjeska’s books include Exiles At Home (1981), Poppy (1990), The Orchard (1994) and Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999) all of which won major Australian literary awards. The Mountain (2012) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her most recent book, a memoir, is Second Half First (2015).

Works By Drusilla Modjeska

The Insects and the Trees
Hard Joy widens the lens, looking back across the span of seventy years to consider those fundamental human questions of what makes us, and who makes us.
25 Sept. 2022
What Am I, Really?
While they were written at a time of highly charged crisis – both politically, and personally for their authors – their urgency still speaks to us as readers of our own charged times. For as well as the stripping of a person, the reduction of a ma...
6 Mar. 2022
Probably Not Tomorrow
Amid the detours and the fragments, the sky-blue grip of life holds its own against the centrifugal force of illness and death. Which is why I describe these books, in some odd, indefinable way, as invigorating.
15 Feb. 2021
‘Anyway, how do you write paintings?’
It’s no easy task to render a sprawling archive into a narrative that captures the significance of Paula Modersohn-Becker for a readership a century later – a figure not only of her time but also for ours. A trace, she calls it, and yes, it is her...
2 Aug. 2018
They Bring Their Somethings: Visitants by Randolph Stow
A modernist novel of a colonial moment told with a postcolonial mind: ‘Thirty-five years after its first publication,’ writes Drusilla Modjeska in her introduction to a new edition of Randolph Stow’s 1979 novel, ‘Visitants remains, in my view, the...
14 Aug. 2015

Works Featuring Drusilla Modjeska

What To Leave Out
Two memoirs, one fiction? Or one family history, two fictions entwined into a single narrative, and a ‘reflection on the arc of a life’? All three of these books show women writing themselves into being, as they construct narrative from the raw ma...
9 Feb. 2016