Dark Matters
Published on 1. August 2017
978-1-925581-11-9 (ISBN)
Description
In a dawn raid, Ekaterina (Kate) is arrested. She is imprisoned, beaten, kept awake and tortured. She has no idea what has happened to her partner, Mercedes. The uncertainty plagues her. It is as if she has no history. Trying to retain her sense of self in a swirling psychic state, she invents stories. And she remembers stories of her mother, her grandmothers and aunts, the rich mythic traditions of Greece. She rearranges them and writes poems in her head. Thirty years later, her niece Desi is going through Kate's papers after her death, trying to make sense of her aunt's life. Susan Hawthorne's dark story uncovers hidden histories of organized violence. She traces fear and uncertainty, and finds a narrative of resilience created through the writing of poems and stories. The author asks: how do we pass on stories hidden by shame and resistance to shame? A novel that is both poetic and terrifying.
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Person
Susan Hawthorne is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. Her works include a novel, The Falling Woman (1992), Limen, a verse novel (2013) and poetry collections Lupa and Lamb (2014), Cow (2011), Earth's Breath (2009) and The Butterfly Effect (2005) among others. She has been the recipient of international residencies in Rome and Chennai, had her work played on ABC's Poetica and been included in a number of Best of anthologies. She has translated literary works from Sanskrit, Greek and Latin and her books and poems have been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Indonesian. Susan was the winner of the Penguin Random House Best Achievement in Writing, 2017 Inspire Award for her work increasing people's awareness about epilepsy and the politics of disability.
