Josephine Wilson,
for Middleborough
Josephine Wilson is a Perth-based writer and academic. Her novel Extinctions (UWA Publishing, 2016) won the inaugural Dorothy Hewett Award, the 2017 Miles Franklin Award, the Colin Roderick Award, and was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literature Award. Her first novel was Cusp, (UWA Publishing, 2005). Her creative output includes performance, poetry, essays and reviews. She lectures in English and Creative Writing at Murdoch University.
“Writing takes time. In truth, writing needs to take time. If it doesn’t, something else will - something like illness, or caring for others, or trying to make a living. I want to thank the nominators and judges of the Paragraph Fellowship for this timely and completely unexpected award, which has reminded me that I need to take time, and not to be afraid if I do.
I am proud to acknowledge that older writers can be emerging; we can be early career too. I sincerely hope we can make more opportunities in the literary field that set the criteria for inclusion or exclusion not age, but rather on where writers find themselves in the complex and unpredictable reality of a writing career”.
Middleborough
Middleborough is a semi-realist novel set on a long suburban street that runs between highway and river. At the highway end is public housing, 1960s high rise and a half-way house for men transitioning from long-term incarceration, at the river-end cliffside mansions made of oil, gas, and gold inexorably rise in value. But who can think about class on a day like this? Certainly not the women of upper-upper Middleborough, most of whom have already slipped into their buttery Lycra. And not Mariana and Audrey, who both live towards the highway end and who have their own reasons for avoiding gyms and Lycra. But as the day unfolds, events far offshore in the Indian ocean will precipitate a local catastrophe which, while hindsight may well declare predictable (if not inevitable), to the people of Middleborough arrives as shocking, extraordinary and from the point of view of the synoptic chart, absolutely inexplicable.