More and more, I sense I’m out of touch. Can my expat writing still call Australia home? | Mikaella Clements
Putting anything down is an exercise in vulnerability but the fear of getting my homeland wrong is embarrassing and invalidating
I’ve lived overseas for 12 years, the vast majority of my adult life. I visit Australia every year (global pandemics permitting) but I’m no longer allowed to vote. I consider Melbourne my home town and brag about it relentlessly but my accent has become hopelessly mangled. And though my nationality is the first line of my standard bio – Mikaella is an Australian writer based in Berlin – it’s rarely apparent in my actual writing.
My fiction already has a strange, hybrid quality; I write novels with my wife, Onjuli Datta, our two voices twining around one another with more than a decade’s worth of practice to create a shared language I step into as easily as my own. Onjuli is British, as is the heroine of our first novel, but, if we were taking turns, I skipped mine.
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