Meet the shortlist: Maxine Beneba Clarke

Foreign Soil is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Maxine Beneba Clarke five quick questions.


If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

My own bookstore would be a catastrophic, commercial disaster. It’d be full of books most people have never heard of, but that I thought were the best books on earth. I’d probably do things like stock the first book in Octavia Butler’s African-American science fiction series, The Parable of The Sower, but refuse to stock (or even order in on request) the sequel, The Parable of the Talents, because it doesn’t live up to scratch and I wouldn’t want the reader to be as devastated as I was.

There would also be lots of free kids story times, plush reading beds with feather doonas scattered throughout and a coffee shop with an award-winning barrister and magnificent pastry chef. There would be reading spas around the place too, so books would probably get ruined all the time. On the shelves there would always be We Are All Born Free (the kid’s version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which each right is illustrated by a different children’s author); my favourite kids book Liza Lou and The Yeller Belly Swamp (see below); and my favourite short-story collection, A Piece of Mine by the under-appreciated African-American author J. California Cooper. Reading her book feels like sitting down to a crumble with best friends and a pot of fresh cream.

There would also be nine-thousand copies of Foreign Soil for sale in my store, because us writers are terribly narcissistic like that.

What’s the strangest piece of advice you’ve ever been given as a writer? (And did it work?)

The strangest advice I’ve been given as a writer was advice from a publisher that publishing a short-story collection as my first fiction book would irreparably damage my entire writing career, and that all of my subsequent books would be detrimentally affected by the monumental and catastrophic failure such a venture would absolutely prove to be. It worked, though not in the way intended. I’m much like a sullen, determined, slightly-tipsy fifteen-year-old who’s just been presented with a giant, brimming beer-bong when a challenge like that is put before me: Oh, really? You don’t think I can do it? Watch this.

Do you remember the first book that made you want to be a writer?

The first book that made me want to be a writer was a kids book called Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp by American author Mercer Mayer. It’s the story of a plucky little black girl who lives with her mother on the edge of a swamp who is one day charged with taking the clothes her mother’s washed back to the Parson and his wife. On the way, she outsmarts all manner of ogre, witch and swamp creature, using her wits and wiles to escape unscathed. For a while, Liza Lou was read almost every evening as the bedtime book in my home. I think it may’ve been the first book where I saw a character who looked like me. And she was sharp, sly and brazen to boot (which I misguidedly imagined I was too).

Reading Liza Lou made me really aware of the other worlds that could be imagined and helped me realise that in fiction, anything was possible – little brown girls could even be their own heroes! What magic was this? And the language! Liza Lou’s mother called Liza Lou ‘honey-chile’ and told her ‘mind you keep your wits about you’. Instead of church clothes, they wore ‘Sunday go-to-meeting finery’. That picture book did things to language I didn’t understand, and I wanted to understand how they were done, and be able to do them myself.

Do you listen to music while you write? Why or why not?

Until you asked the question, I’d never even considered listening to music while I write. I have no idea why. Come to think of it though, I’m drawn to connections between sound and story – most of the music I listen to is really lyric-driven. I tend do most of my listening while doing things that don’t require intense concentration: cooking, walking, cleaning. It sounds odd, but it feels almost like I’d be disrespecting both works of art to consume and create at the same time.

That said, music absolutely has a large influence on my work, especially my short fiction. Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’, Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ and the Neville Brothers’ ‘Sista Rosa’ are some of the first short stories I really fell in love with as an adult.

If Foreign Soil were made into a film, who would you like to see in the starring role?

I’m thinking to play the character of ‘Maxine Beneba Clarke’ in the semi-autobiographical story ‘Sukiyaki Book Club’ either Beyoncé or Halle Berry would be the most obvious choice in terms of looking quite similar. Yet, even though they’re both stunning enough to play me, I’m not sure they’re edgy or feisty enough and so the answer would probably be either Eartha Kitt circa 1957, or Grace Jones circa 1980. (Insert your eye-roll here.)

In all seriousness, the most amazing thing about Foreign Soil ever being made into some kind of series would be all of those incredible parts for actors of colour in Australia: Sri Lankan, African, Chinese, Sudanese, West-Indian, Black British, African-Australian, Anglo-Australian. It would be the casting call of casting calls. Having seen my mother tread the boards in Australian theatres as the Barbajan maid in Arthur Lee Miller’s The Crucible three times, and Calpurnia in To Kill A Mockingbird twice, cross-cultural and culturally appropriate casting is something I feel really strongly about.

I can easily see Quvenzhané Wallis from Beasts of The Southern Wild playing my Ella, the sassy little African-American girl in the sweltering hot block of flats in New Orleans, and Australian actress Melissa George playing Ange, from the title story ‘Foreign Soil’. There’s also a very nuanced and challenging role for Russell Crowe up there in that New Orleans apartment block… But that’s an in-joke only people who’ve read the book will appreciate.


To celebrate our our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re inviting everyone to take part in our NAW Reading Challenge! Find out more here.

Cover image for Foreign Soil

Foreign Soil

Maxine Beneba Clarke

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