![]() ![]() ‘Your writing is genuinely astonishing,’ goes one publisher’s rejection in the story, ‘but I’d like to read something you’ve written that deals with more everyday themes. The book’s final story, ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club,’ and the dilemma of its main character, also an author, suggests Clarke’s own difficulty in getting her work published. It now comes to the UK amid heated political debate over immigration threats to domestic security, in the wake of terror attacks in Brussels and in the run-up to the EU referendum.Ĭlarke, an Australian slam poetry champion of Afro-Caribbean descent, explores foreignness from a multitude of angles: first-generation offspring of immigrants and those who moved to new countries in mid-life racial minorities struggling against bigotry naive rural children encountering big-city dangers people in interracial relationships those whose gender makes them feel like strangers even to themselves and, most poignantly of all, the hopeless tragedy of child soldiers, forced to commit brutal acts and flee for sanctuary abroad, only to find there is no salvation and no escape from their inner burden. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s debut collection, Foreign Soil, was first published two years ago in Australia after winning an award for best unpublished manuscript. Literary stories about immigration and refugees could not be more timely. ![]()
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