Dennis Glover: Thaw @WheelerCentre

Uploaded November 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

For Melbourne City Reads, Dennis Glover, author of The Last Man in Europe and Factory 19, and one of Australia’s leading speechwriters and political commentators, sat down with Ramona Koval to share the inspiration, research and thought-provoking ideas behind his new novel Thaw.

Taking as its inspiration the ill-fated 1912 Antarctic expedition undertaken by British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, and coupling it with a contemporary tale about climate change, Thaw examines the unfathomable power of the natural world, and the enduring resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

$Visions & Revisions Each work that engages with history (and all do, to some degree or another) raises questions about how our visions and revisions of the past … inform the ways in which we live now, the ways we make sense of and treat each other, the ways we see beyond our individual moments to broader fractures and allegiances, collective memories or amnesias. – Bella Li, Liminal Interview #73 (2018) Poems are inevitably entangled in our fraught and fraying histories. Projecting such visions and revisions of the past, a poem is an assemblage, a translation, a palimpsest. As Lucy Van writes in The Open: Each day here is different. But say that each day here is the same. In this way, each day has no history. In this way, desire.’ A poem as history’s cracked mirror; a kind of opening; a rock thrown into a lost lake. Poets Bella Li and Lucy Van think through poetics, histories, and how to wield language on one’s own terms. Hosted by Sydney Review of Books editor James Jiang. Supported by the Sydney Review of Books. Presented in partnership with Liminal.$

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