Showing results by author "Maxine Beneba Clarke" in All Categories

Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three-bedroom blonde brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids' on her street. Except for this one glaring, inescapably obvious thing. From one of Australia's most exciting writers and the author of the multiaward-winning Foreign Soil comes The Hate Race: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.

In this collection of award-winning stories, Melbourne writer Maxine Beneba Clarke has given a voice to the disenfranchised, the lost, the downtrodden and the mistreated. It will challenge you; it will have you by the heartstrings. This is contemporary fiction at its finest. In Melbourne's western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories. The book is called Foreign Soil.

Learning to kick a football in a suburban schoolyard. Finding your feet as a young black dancer. Discovering your grandfather’s poetry. Meeting Nelson Mandela at your local church. Facing racism from those who should protect you. Dreading a visit to the hairdresser. House-hopping across the suburbs. Being too black. Not being black enough. Singing to find your soul, and then losing yourself. Welcome to African Australia. Compiled by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke, with curatorial assistance from writers Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Maga.

This extraordinary collection celebrates the joy of language and features enticing and relatable poems about everyday life – the sounds of the block, the boredom of detention and the happenings in the schoolyard. Poems about candy, peanut butter and pets. Poems about a big brother’s messy room, a grandfather’s fading memory and a grandmother’s garden magic. Through haiku, sonnets, narrative verse, rhyming couplets, limericks, free verse, tongue-twisters and more, Maxine Beneba Clarke invites listeners to fall in love with the wonder that is poetry.

Beautiful changelings is an incantation, a song, a war cry, a testimonial, a lament, a reckoning and a welcoming. Wrecking-ball revisitings of the myths, mantras and fairy tales fed to girls. Poignant, unashamed tributes to ageing, womanhood, motherhood, and reclaiming your dreams, your boundaries and your time.