Dr Delia Falconer
Senior Lecturer, Creative Practices Group
BA, PhD
Email: Delia.Falconer@uts.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 9514 1682
Fax: +61 2 9514 4344
Room: CB03.04.49 (map)
Mailing address: PO Box 123,
Broadway NSW 2007,
Australia
Biography
Delia Falconer is the author of two novels, the bestselling The Service of Clouds, shortlisted for major literary awards including the Miles Franklin, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the Australian Booksellers' Book of the Year; and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories, shortlisted among other awards for the Spur Award for Best Short Western Novel (US) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is also the editor of The Penguin Book of the Road (2008) and Best Australian Stories (2008 and 2009). This year New South will publish Sydney: Haunted City, her personal guide to her hometown, in its series on Australian cities.
Delia Falconer began her career as a professional writer in 1994 when she won two national literary awards: the inaugural Island Essay Prize, and the inaugural HQ short story competition. Her short stories and essays have been widely anthologised, including in the recent Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories and various editions of The Best Australian Essays and The Best Australian Stories. Her criticism appears regularly in The Australian Literary Review, The Australian, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, and is frequently linked by international online digests such as 3 Quarks Daily, Arts and Letters Daily, and Bookforum.com.
Delia Falconer has acted as a judge of The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, Age Book of the Year, Inaugural ABC Fiction Prize, Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Writer, RAKA Kate Challis Award for Indigenous Creative Artists, Age short story competition and NSW Premier's Literary Awards, as well as a peer adviser to the Australia Council and the Australian Society of Authors. She has held a number of grants and residencies, including the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, fellowships at Varuna and Bundanon, and a six-week fellowship from the Australia Council to work at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. As the winner of the James Joyce Suspended Sentence short story competition, 2003, she travelled to Dublin, Trieste and Bejing as the Australian James Joyce Fellow. In 2009 she was invited to speak and read at Harvard, as part of a week of activities around the US publication by Norton of the Macquarie Pen Anthology as The Literature of Australia.
Before beginning to teach at UTS in 2004, she taught cultural studies and creative writing at the University of Melbourne; and creative writing at UTS, where she coordinated the MA program. Her students have won the WA Premier's Literary Award, been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the Orange Prize, and have been published in Best Australian Stories.
In 2008 Delia Falconer was the Inaugural Scholar in Writing in 2008 in Creative Practices at UTS. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne.
Professional
Australian Society of Authors member
PEN Member
2003-2007 board member of Varuna: The Writers' House
Member, Advisory Board, The Australian Literature Compendium
Advisor, symposium on the future of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2008
Teaching areas
Postgraduate:
Professional Writing Project
MA and PhD supervision
Research
Research interests
Novel, history of the novel; essay; creative non-fiction; Australian fiction; literary criticism; and "things" (the cultural history of objects).
Current research
Creative writing; non-fiction; journalism.
She is working on a novel, and a collection of essays about our changing relationship to “things” in the late twentieth-century.
Research supervision: Yes
Publications
Research books
Falconer, D.C. 2010, Sydney, 1, UNSW Press, Sydney, Australia.
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This is a commissioned cultural history/memoir about Sydney, 50,000 words long. It covers Sydney's indigenous history; social history; and psychogeography, wound around memoir recalling the history of Sydney in the 60s through to 80s.
Book editorship
Falconer, D.C. 2009, Best Australian Stories 2009, Black Inc, Melbourne.
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Yearly selection of the year's best short stories, including introduction
Falconer, D.C. 2008, Best Australian Stories 2008, Black Inc, Melbourne.
Falconer, D.C. 2008, The Penguin Book of the Road, Penguin, Camberwell.
Refereed journal articles
Falconer, D.C. 2009, ''The Poetry of the Earth is Never Dead': Australia's Road Writing', Journal of the Association for the study of Australian ..., vol. 2009, no. Special Is, pp. 1-16.
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This article discusses the process of editing The Australian Book of the Road. It uses William Hay+s +An Australian Rip Van Winkle+ as an exemplary Australian road text. With its diffuse sense of hauntedness, multiple time-warps, and eerie appropriation of northern hemisphere literary texts, Hay+s story offers a suggestive frame for reflecting on our relationship with the road in Australia and the way it is figured in our writing; to consider the road not only as a material artefact represented by our road texts but a set of cultural traditions and tropes. Its layered hauntings offer paths to unpacking of the odd sense of unease that permeates so many of these road stories. Using +road writing+ (my own term) as a strategic generic category through which disparate works can be interpreted, this paper will consider them as instances of +spatial history+, following Paul Carter, opposed to more triumphalist literary traditions. It will also, finally, consider the Australian road within a global context; in particular, the strategic ways in which these stories play with strategies of adaptation.
Journal articles
Falconer, D.C. 2005, '"Passagework"', Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 207-212.
Refereed conference papers
Falconer, D.C. 2008, 'The Challenge of the 'Post-postmodern'', Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, Sydney, Australia, November 2008 in The Creativity and Uncertainty Papers: the refereed proceedings of the 13th conference of the Australian Association of Writing Programs, 2008, ed Brien, Donna Lee and Lucy Neave, Australian Association of Writing Programs, Griffith University, pp. 1-10.
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Using Dr Alan Kirby's essay 'The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond' as a starting point, this paper discusses his claim that we have passed from 'postmodernism' into a 'post-postmodern' era and considers what this means for the teaching of postmodern texts in creative writing courses within the academy.
Published creative work
Falconer, D.C. 2005, 'The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers', Picador, Sydney, Australia.
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The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers is a novel based on historical research in the US, and was published in hard cover by Picador Australia in 2005; it was republished in 2006 in paperback as The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories. It as published in hardback by Soft Skull in the US in 2006, and in paperback by Counterpoint US in 2009. It has been taught in university creative writing courses in Australia (University of Melbourne, University of Western Australia) and at the New School (NYC, USA). It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize (Asia Pacific Division) 2006; two Adelaide Festival Awards (Novel, and Innovation) in 2006; and for the US Spur awards (Best Short Western Novel).
Falconer, D.C. 2004, 'Hadrian in Hell', The Best Australian Stories 2004, Blank Inc, Melbourne, Australia.
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Falconer, D.C. 2003, 'The Historical Novel in Australia', The Best Australian Essays 2003, Black Inc., Melbourne, Australia, pp. 397-407.
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The essay 'The Historical Novel in Australia' was an intervention into a debate, initiated by novelist Malcolm Knox, that too many historical novels were being published in Australia, to the detriment of an engaged realism. My essay provided an overview of recent developments in the Australian historical novel, and theoretical concepts of writing history into fiction. It was selected, by competitive process, for the annual Australian showcase of best Australian essays for the year, by Peter Craven. It, and Knox's original essay, are often cited in academic papers on the historical novel in Australia
Falconer, D.C. 2001, 'The Intimacy of the Table', storykeepers, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, Australia.
Falconer, D.C. 2000, 'Acqua Alta', The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories, Ringwood, Australia.
Falconer, D.C. 2000, 'The Water Poets', The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, Camberwell:Penguin, Australia.
Falconer, D.C. 1997, 'The Service of Clouds', Picador Australia, Sydney.
Other published creative work
Falconer, D.C. 2009, 'Republic of Love', Macquarie/PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, ALLEN & UNWIN, Sydney, Australia, pp. 100-104.
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This is the first major anthology of Australian literature to be published in the last 20 years. Some of the best, most significant writing produced in Australia over more than two centuries is gathered in this landmark anthology. Covering all genres from fiction, poetry and drama to diaries, letters, essays and speeches, the anthology maps the development of one of the great literatures in English in all its energy and variety. Republic of Love was also singled out for mention by one of the editors, Kerryn Goldsworthy, on the Book Show on Radio National
Other exhibited creative works
Falconer, D.C. 2006, '"Republic of Love"', Manoa Journal, University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii, pp. 100-104.
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I, Mary the Larrikin, tart of Jerilderie, have loved for roast beef and I have loved for the feather on a well-trimmed hat. In my room above the hotel bar I have felt a squatter's spurs and sucked once on a bishop's fingers. The perfumes of my thighs have greased many a stockman's saddle and kept him company through lonely nights. Men can nose out my room from thirty miles away, their saddlebags tight and heavy with desire. But of all the men I have ever loved, Ned Kelly, dead three years before they put him in the ground, stole my heart away.
