Writers Read: Trent Jamieson

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Trent Jamieson

Trent Jamieson lives in Brisbane, Australia. A multiple Aurealis Award winner for short fiction, he has taught short story writing at the Queensland University of Technology, and Clarion South Writer's Workshop. Death Most Definite, Book One of the Death Works Series, was published by Orbit Books in September 2010. Book Two, Managing Death, was released in January 2011, and Book Three, The Business of Death, is due for publication in September 2011. He has just sold a two book series of Steampunkish novels to Angry Robot Books, the first of which, Roil, is due for publication in September 2011.

Recently I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I've just recently finished reading a fabulous debut novel by a friend of mine Chris Currie. The book is called The Ottoman Motel, and is due to be published by Text Publishing in May 2011. I make mention of the fact that I know Chris, because when you read a book by a friend, someone you've worked with for years, you go into it with certain expectations, and trepidation as well - what if I don't like the book?

Well, I loved the book, and it's truthful depiction of loss and small town life in coastal Australia. Chris is a funny guy, he makes me laugh a lot. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this dark meditation on yearning and fear, and just what happens when the world you thought you understood is yanked out from under you. But I'm glad that's what I found. It's the sort of book that draws you in softly and slowly then takes your breath away.

And the writing. Oh the writing!

I don't have the book with me, but some of his similes made me at once extremely jealous and extremely joyous, because Chris is an author than can make you see a simple gesture, the commonest sort of thing as a revelation of the new.

Good writers are about angles, drawing you in, making you see the world in different way, or from a different perspective. Chris has that talent and then some: he isn't just a good writer but a superlative one. And The Ottoman Motel is the start of what I am sure will be a fabulous literary career, in and out of Australia.