Luke Carman is an Australian fiction writer and academic. He is known for his collection of semi-autobiographical stories, which is entitled ''An Elegant Young Man''. The stories are set in

Liverpool Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...

, Australia, a suburb outside

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

. He has been called a post-grunge lit writer, a reference to an Australian literary genre from the 2000s which emerged following the 1990s

grunge lit Grunge lit (an abbreviation for "grunge literature") is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people living in suburban or inner-city surrou ...

genre.

Career

''An Elegant Young Man''

His first book, ''An Elegant Young Man'', won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for New Writing. ''An Elegant Young Man'' is a collection of short stories that are linked together, and which are semi-autobiographical. The stories have a

protagonist A protagonist () is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a ...

whose name is also Luke and who lives in the author's hometown. Carman stated that he used Liverpool, Australia, as a setting because Australia's "western suburbs have been largely absent from the face of Australian fiction", with an effort to show the "...ugliness of working class suburbia and the pain of being an outsider" with "...authenticity, warts and all." In one of the stories, a teen who "...dreams of fame fade into an adulthood of blue collar work"; the narrator/author is described as a "...passive force, constantly in the midst of the action but solely as an observer who cannot save anybody", as if in "

paralysis Paralysis (: paralyses; also known as plegia) is a loss of Motor skill, motor function in one or more Skeletal muscle, muscles. Paralysis can also be accompanied by a loss of feeling (sensory loss) in the affected area if there is sensory d ...

", until characters' lives are "quietly lost to monotony." In another story, a female character who faces an abusive relationship becomes addicted to drugs. Carman used a "writers’ network" to hold discussions about draft versions of the book and perform the drafts, which helped him to develop his writing

Other activities and awards

He is a casual academic at

Western Sydney University Western Sydney University, formerly the University of Western Sydney, is an Australian multi-campus public research university in the Greater Western region of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The university in its current form was founde ...

's Writing And Society Research Centre. In 2014, the ''

Sydney Morning Herald ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' (''SMH'') is a daily tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, and owned by Nine Entertainment. Founded in 1831 as the ''Sydney Herald'', the ''Herald'' is the oldest continuously published newspaper in ...

'' named him the Best Young Novelist. One of his stories, "Liverpool Boys", is used in the SBS podcast series entitled '' True Stories'', which showcases what SBS calls "Australia’s best emerging and early-career writers." He has published in ''HEAT'', ''Westside'' and the ''Cultural Studies Review''. ''Intimate Antipathies'', a collection of his essays was published in July 2019 by Giramondo, while a further collection, ''An Ordinary Ecstasy'', was published in 2022.

Essay on Melbourne's literary scene

In 2016, Carman's essay on the

Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...

literary scene attracted international attention. An article in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' stated what while "Australian creative industries are in crisis... Luke Carman’s galvanising and venomous essay has started the wrong conversation" with his essay, a "jeremiad against the Melbourne literary scene that was published in the journal ''

Meanjin ''Meanjin'' (), formerly ''Meanjin Papers'' and ''Meanjin Quarterly'', is one of Australia's longest-running literary magazines. Established in 1940 in Brisbane, it moved to Melbourne in 1945 and as of 2008 is an editorially independent impri ...

''. Carman's essay criticizes "arts administrators at creative institutions – journals, festivals, funding bodies and hubs", who he states are "anti-artists". Ben Eltham states that top arts administrators may earn higher salaries than the poorly-paid writers. At the journal ''Overland'', Emmett Stinson stated that the "response o the essayhas been overwhelmingly negative"; however, he stated that for "...all of its hyperbolic rhetoric, the essay is a call for a limited form of underclass literary revolt – and the studied refusal of a creeping professionalisation" in the writing world.

References

External links