Meet our 2021 Best Young Australian novelists

This year the Best Young Australian Novelists awards expand to be the Herald and Age awards. In their 25th year all three writers are first-time novelists. Two of them – Vivian Pham (The Coconut Children) and Jessie Tu (A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing) – migrated to Australia with their families, while K.M. (Kate) Kruimink (A Treacherous Country) is from Tasmania.

All three novels stand out for the strength of the voices and the characters around whom the narratives revolve. Their settings are very different: in one we follow the main character’s eventful life in Sydney and New York up to around the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, one is a historical novel set in Tasmania in the 1840s, while the third is set among the Vietnamese community in Cabramatta in the 1990s. There are moments of great tenderness, great bleakness and great humour.

The judges were Miles Franklin-shortlisted novelist Peggy Frew, previous Best Young Australian Novelist Pip Smith, and me.

This is the 25th year of the awards, which were established by former Herald literary editor Susan Wyndham to recognise emerging local writing talent. The awards are open to writers aged 35 and younger at the time of publication of their nominated books. This year, thanks to the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Vivian Pham will receive $8000, with Kate Kruimink and Jessie Tu each getting $1000.

VIVIAN PHAM
Vivian Pham began her novel when she was in year 11. It was published last year when she was only 19. The Coconut Children is about Sonny, 16 years old and living with her parents in Cabramatta, and her former childhood friend and next-door neighbour Vince, also Vietnamese Australian, who has just been released from two years in detention. He is tough, handsome and lost; she is gentle, funny and quietly obsessed with him. Sonny’s father is a loving parent and has survived a traumatic escape from Vietnam; her mother is loud, grating and demanding. Vince’s father is a traumatised violent drunk; his mother brow-beaten but loving.

When Pham was doing the HSC and redrafting the novel, she came across the idea of post memory: of second-generation trauma inherited via the stories and behaviour of the previous generation. It is an idea that runs through the novel.

Vivian Pham started her novel when she was in Year 11.Credit: Louie Douvis

“You want to know the people that are closest to you. You know something epic has happened to them, to make them the people that they are, and you want to know why that happened. I was just interested in the different layers a story comes in and the different forms it comes in and what it can say about the people that are telling it.”

Finding the voice for Sonny wasn’t difficult. Vince was a different matter. “I was thinking about what it means to have a teenage boy that is violent against the world and violence is committed against him and what it must be like.”

The judges said Pham’s non-judgmental portraits of parents living with trauma, and children struggling to comprehend their parents’ choices, was nuanced and wise. “It’s work one would expect from a writer far beyond Pham’s very young years. Each of us eagerly await the future development of this remarkable new voice and firework of a talent.”

Pham based some of Vince’s experiences – especially his time in detention and what teenagers did in Cabramatta in the 1990s – on a relative who had been in trouble with the law. And there was the influence of James Baldwin, the writer who got her into reading seriously and realising that it could change your world.

“I remember the civil rights photographer Gordon Parks and his photo essay about a boy named Red Jackson, this gang leader in Harlem, a teenager. There are portraits of him staring in the mirror, looking really cinematic, being in a brawl but also cuddling his sibling and helping his mum sweep the house. I was interested in how people could be treated like they’ll destroy everything that comes their way, but also they’re incredibly tender and vulnerable too.”

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People talk to Pham a lot about Sonny, but she says she doesn’t have much to say about her – are they too close, perhaps? – whereas she adores Vince – “as a character and as a person, and he really motivated me”.

Pham’s first writing was fan fiction – like, but very different from, E.L. James of Fifty Shades of Grey fame. She bounced off One Direction singer Harry Styles for her writing: “It was wanting to get something on the page, wanting to completely take control of the light that is cast on someone. Fictionalising a real person makes you feel like you have total control. So much freedom and really motivating.”

I wondered whether The Coconut Children was to some extent a love letter to Cabramatta, despite the book being set in the ’90s. Pham was adamant it was, partly because she felt more connection to Vietnam there than in Vietnam, when she spends all her time at her grandmother’s home.

“It’s just changed so much, been industrialised, changed so much from the stories I’ve been told from my parents. And I can see those stories and the people who carry those stories all the time in Cabramatta. There’s a real connection there, and just knowing the vast number of the families there came there in the same situations as my parents.”

Pham is now studying philosophy and creative writing at Western Sydney University. While The Coconut Children was going through the editing process she wrote 30,000 words of another novel, inspired by her surprising, second favourite novelist, P.G. Wodehouse. And she’s co-writing a book with the co-founder of an agricultural start-up, a sort of “allegorical self-help book”.
The Coconut Children is published by Hamish Hamilton.

K.M. KRUIMINK
Kate Kruimink crashed through the first draft of A Treacherous Country because she had a serious deadline – she wanted to enter the manuscript for the Vogel Prize. She sent off the 30,000 words and duly won the $20,000 prize, a prize that has launched the careers of writers such as Kate Grenville and Tim Winton.

She then had a year before publication, which was fortunate, because she expanded it from novella to novel length. A Treacherous Country tells the story of Gabriel Fox, newly arrived in Tasmania from England on a mission – to find one Maryanne Maginn, who was transported as a young girl, and to deliver to her a letter from Mrs Prendergast, the mother of Gabriel’s beloved, Susanna. Once in Tasmania, however, he is beset by difficulties, major and minor, involving a stolen horse, two new-fangled harpoons he has been lumbered with, a mysterious French-speaking “cannibal” and drama in a whale hunt.

K.M. Kruimink won the Vogel Award for her Gothic quest novel.Credit: Matthew Herbstritt

Kruimink had just given birth to her daughter Edie and wanted to reconnect with her “intellectual side”. She had found the experience of early motherhood tough and used writing as a coping mechanism – to give her purpose and something to think about other than nappies.

“When I decided this was going to be my project, I turned to an older manuscript I’d started back at uni, which was about the woman he’s looking for. It was her story of being transported. Because I was in a vulnerable place, it was too emotional for me. It was a sad story and I felt like I couldn’t write about this sad young woman and I decided to write about a silly young man instead. But he kind of evolved as I wrote. I couldn’t keep myself out of it, and he turned into me at about 25.”

Really? “Sort of bumbling along, making some stupid choices, but meaning well – whatever that’s worth.”

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The judges said Kruimink delivered “a stand-out voice – eccentric, funny and deceptively endearing. While the research behind the writing is evident, it is handled with a lightness of touch, and the language itself is truly impressive, ornate, yet controlled and deft. The reader cannot help hoping desperately for loveable, hapless Gabriel Fox to fulfil his bumbling mission and for the tenderness of his heart to be rewarded. Like Gabriel – who, despite his many abject misadventures in a wet, dark and cold Van Diemen’s land, maintains a delightful buoyancy and sweetness of spirit – this is a book that works its crooked charm to lasting effect.”

Kruimink reckons she will go back to that earlier iteration of Maryanne Maginn, and indeed she has done some more work on the story. But her plan for her second novel is very different – it will be about organ donation. She envisages a narrative about two sisters, and how one dies and the other donates her organs.

It’s inspired by her own mother, and her “sudden and shocking death. The fact that we were able to donate her organs – and she told us clearly that that was what she wanted, even when she was well and had no expectation of death – it gives such purpose and meaning which would otherwise be a purposeless thing. There are half a dozen people who are alive or can see because of her. They are just as precious as mum was.”

Kruimink’s novel was recently longlisted in Britain for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. She was, of course, delighted; but there was more reason for that delight. “All I could think when I saw that was that Hilary Mantel was going to see my name. That was enough.”

She hesitates to name Mantel as an inspiration – “I don’t want people to think I’m comparing myself to her, I just find reading someone as good as her or Ishiguro to be invigorating”.

But she says one book by the double Booker winner, Beyond Black, had a profound impact: “It really made me start thinking differently about writing. It was just like she reached out of the book and slapped me round the face. Made me realise it’s possible to do quite extraordinary things through writing”.
A Treacherous Country is published by Allen & Unwin.

JESSIE TU
When Jessie Tu was learning English as a second language – she migrated from Taiwan with her family at the age of five – her teacher would get her to write a daily journal as an exercise and she would write precisely what she had done the day before. “That helped me develop a habit of writing just like the way you might brush your teeth. It wasn’t a massive deal to write every day.”

While she may no longer write a journal every day, there’s no escaping the benefits of doing so. “Writing calms me in the way that some people go into the garden or go for a walk,” she says. “I get anxious about so many stupid things; sitting down to write it all down makes that throb in my throat calm down. Once it’s on the page I realise how ridiculous my anxieties are.”

Jessie Tu says she’s not surprised her father hasn’t read her novel “about sex”. Credit: Louie Douvis

A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing is in many ways a confronting book. Jena Lin is a former child prodigy violinist who has deliberately and controversially turned her back on her life as an acclaimed soloist. She is scraping by, playing casually with orchestras, uncertain of her musical career, and sexually active and promiscuous. The judges said from these worlds and from Jena’s place between them “Tu, with unswerving clarity, draws out many unsettling and compelling questions regarding race, talent, performance, perfectionism, agency and worth. A provocative book, skilfully written, that burns with an uncompromising power.”

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Right from 2017, when she started work on A Lonely Girl, Tu had the issues in mind that she wanted to address. What drives a good novel, she believes, is the kind of questions it considers.

“I remember when I was writing it I was a bit hesitant about whether I was trying to tackle too many issues at once, but then I was ‘so what, I’ll just put it all in and see what happens’. I’m someone very much of the philosophy that you need to make mistakes in order to learn. I would never shy away from doing something. And being pushed to doing something I don’t know how to do and then failing publicly, you learn from that experience I guess.”

She has admitted previously to being slightly obsessed with loneliness. It is, she says, the feeling that over the years has caused her the most grief. While she wishes that she had some religious belief to help deal with moments of sadness, she concedes she is entirely secular.

“I’ve been trying to think constantly where to seek solace for my feeling that I don’t belong in this world and what I found really comforting was reading stories about women in the past, especially female artists or female writers, and realising that they have also gone through sad, lonely lives. For me to know that helps me understand that this feeling that I have is not at all special. I’m just another human being and there are women in the past who have done extraordinary things who have also felt what I felt.”

Tu drew on her own experience as a violinist, playing casually with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and other orchestras, for Jena. But she no longer plays. “I just feel a lot of negative feelings that I had when I was playing 10, 15 years ago; they are still quite raw and tender. I wouldn’t say it gives me the pleasure it used to.”

In one scene Jena laments that only white male composers comprise a program she is playing in. I wondered whether Tu felt things were changing for women?

“No doubt,” she says. “Whether or not that has a lasting impact, only time will tell, right? Things were changing 150 years ago, but we still don’t know the names of all the women who were writing books back then. Or telling stories. What makes me always anguished, I guess, is that I fear things won’t ever change. I look at my seven-year-old niece and I think she will probably face the same shit that I faced.”

Neither of her parents has read the book. Her father could read it, but hasn’t, which she is fine about – “If I was a dad I don’t think I would want to read a book my daughter wrote about sex” – and her mother doesn’t read English at all. Despite the prospect of her parents reading the novel, she would be delighted for it to be translated into Chinese. “I would love for Asian people to read it. That’s so important.”

Before then, though, there’s a second novel to be finished. “It’s a cult and it’s also situated in the classical music world. That’s all I can say.”

A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing is published by Allen & Unwin.
The three novelists will discuss their novels at Sydney Writers Festival on Saturday, May 1, at noon. swf.org.au

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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