Sue Saliba

Sue Saliba is the winner of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Young Adult Fiction with her highly original novel Something In the World Called Love.

Something In The World Called Love

I can relate to aspects of each but as an entire character, it’sEsma I most relate to. It’s Esma who embodies and explores manyautobiographical aspects of my life; most particularly, a near-desperatesearching for a way to feel more alive in the world.As a younger person I was very shy and really struggled with acceptingcertain parts of myself. I thought that if I could learn to be likethose more extroverted and confident people I knew, then I would behappy. Like Esma, I thought that the way to happiness or love lay in‘fixing’ myself up.It was actually through Esma and her journey, as I wrote the novel, thatI discovered for myself that there may be a different path – a gentler,more compassionate one – to experiencing love.

One of the most striking things about your novel is that it does not use any capitalisation at all. How early in the writing process did you make this decision?

From the very beginning, I wrote the piece without anycapitalisation – and it just continued that way. It felt right to me onan instinctual level and I never really thought about it consciously orquestioned it rationally as I wrote.

It’s actually been readers who’ve suggested the possible reasons for theabsence of capitalisation to me – Esma’s emerging character, thefairy-tale like feel of the novel, the internal world of thoughts andfeelings that the novel explores, the expression of a realm withoutjudgement or structure… all kinds of explanations that are reallyinteresting to me.

Your novel has a very strong sense of place, being set in and around the streets, houses and gardens of Carlton and Fitzroy. You currently live on Phillip Island; have you spent a lot of time in Carlton in the past?

Yes, I have. I lived in Carlton while I was a student at RMITand at Melbourne University. I love Carlton with its sense of communityand with lots of people and energy and with its terrace houses andgardens. It makes me feel like I’m inside a fairy tale. I can still seethe stairways and balconies of the houses I lived in and I can remembervisiting the gardens just before night fall when the sky is thatblue-black colour and the bats are beginning to cross overhead and thepossums are emerging from their trees. Although I now live on PhillipIsland, amongst the penguins, seals and prehistoric-looking lapwings,Carlton is still a very special and magical place to me.

Something In The World Called Love

Not completely different – but a little bit different!Writing poetry, for me, is more like creating a fragment or moment withlots of space around it, that allows it to resonate.When writing prose (and I’m thinking particularly of a novel) I’m muchmore aware of the various forces in the overall piece that have to worktogether, the characters and their motivations, the movement of thestory and the character’s journey of transformation.

Cover image for Something in the World Called Love

Something in the World Called Love

Sue Saliba

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