Read an extract of Readings bookseller Teddy Peak’s conversation with Dominic Amerena about his book, I Want Everything, the winner of The Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2025!
You can listen to their full conversation and hear about the other 2025 winners of The Readings Prizes on The Readings Podcast.
Teddy: Hi Dominic, thanks so much for joining me and congrats on winning The Readings Prize this year. For those who might not know anything about your book, could you give us a brief description of the plot?
Dominic: Well firstly, thanks for having me Teddy, it’s wonderful to be here. I suppose, if I was to describe I Want Everything, the elevator pitch is basically about the toxic relationship between an ambitious young writer and a feminist cult author from the seventies. It begins in Melbourne, where our unnamed narrator, who’s a very ambitious writer, has dreams of writing the next great Australian novel; of course, the main problem is he has nothing to write about, he’s really struggling with his ambition, his lack of success.
And then one day, at the Victoria University pool, he stumbles upon an old woman whose face he dimly recognises, and subsequently realises is Brenda Shales, who is a feminist author from the seventies who wrote these two very strange, very important novels that took the literary world by storm, before she mysteriously disappeared from the public eye.
And in her, he sees an opportunity to revive his ailing career, so the narrator kind of worms his way into her affections and tells a lie that he can’t take back, and one thing leads to another and he begins to discover the secrets of what her novels meant and why she disappeared.
Teddy: Amazing! And what was the inspiration for the story?
Dominic: Well, I guess there wasn’t necessarily one thing that inspired the book, but it’s informed by Australia’s troubled history with literary hoaxes, literary scandals.
I think basically since Australia’s had a literary culture, it’s been invested in this idea of authenticity, fakery. We go all the way back to the Ern Malley affair, where these two young poets made a hoax modernist poet to lampoon Australian literary culture, all the way through to John Hughes and his theft of Svetlana Alexievich’s work for his novel The Dogs; and then you go back to the nineties and there were all the scandals to do with people co-opting minority identities, like Helen Darville, Demidenko, as she pretended to be; all the co-opting of First Nations identities like the Wanda Koolmatrie scandal, things like Norma Khouri, so I think basically Australia’s always had this very complicated relationship with feelings about authenticity, with feelings about belonging in a literary sense, and I think that sort of anxiety and that tension and that feeling of fakery was the emotional architecture that inspired the book.
Teddy: Beautiful. You’ve led us right into my next question, which was that we’re both here because of our passion and involvement in Australian literature. Can you talk a little about your relationship with Australian literature and why you think that it’s important?
Dominic: Well, I haven’t been living in Australia for the past ten years, so it’s very surprising but my novel, it’s a very Australian book. I re-read it now and it’s very invested in, not only Australian literary culture but Australian places, Australian people. It’s a book that’s really in conversation with Australia’s literary history, and not only this idea of fakery and authenticity – which is, I think, an expression of a settler unconscious, for lack of a better word, in Australia – but my novel’s also really invested in the work of a lot of writers from a certain era who have been really, really influential on my work.
My novel really centres around this character Brenda Shales, who’s this firebrand author from the seventies, and she’s really a character who’s been constructed in conversation with a lot of the works and biographies of writers who have really shaped my work – Helen Garner, Elizabeth Jolley, Elizabeth Harrower – and so when I reread my novel, I see how Australian it is and how deeply invested it is in the ongoing literary history.
Teddy: Yeah, totally. I was also really interested in the gender relations in your work, particularly as the main character has this complex and resentful relationship with his writer girlfriend, and then he’s co-opting the story of a woman – how did you reflect on that, as you were writing?
Dominic: Well, it’s interesting, these themes or ideas, often you’re not thinking of them as consciously while you’re writing it and often you work out what you think once you’re looking back on the text. The novel expresses a certain form of masculinity, which I find very interesting as a subject. I actually think that when I think of contemporary masculinity, it’s involved with these qualities which are not stereotypically masculine – I think of passivity, of an inability to make decisions, indecisiveness, hiddenness, all of these qualities I really associate with a certain form of contemporary masculinity; so I really was interested in seeing how those qualities could inform a literary heist novel. I was using this plot of a literary mystery and using these qualities of contemporary masculinity to invest the plot with a certain urgency.
Teddy: And I think there’s also a really interesting relationship with settler masculinity and this white masculinity in Australia that constantly feels the need to defend itself, but without ever really defining an enemy.
Dominic: Thank you, yeah, I think my novel is subtly, as you pointed out, in these ideas; his view of writing and fame, it’s very extractive, he thinks of Brenda Shales as a resource, and a resource is something to be consumed for profit. And his attitude towards artmaking, I think is illustrative of a certain settler colonial attitude. The whole novel is trying to create tensions between different viewpoints about what art is and what it’s doing and whether it’s different now to what it used to be. I tried to create a novel that wasn’t that didactic and kept these concepts in tension with each other – at least that’s what I tried to do!
Teddy: Do you have an ideal reader for your book, or is there something you hope that readers are taking away from your book?
Dominic: An ideal reader? I don’t know, that’s an interesting question, because one of the most heartening things about this book was that I was really moved by the diversity of the readers who seemed to engage with the book.
There are those elements of the novel which are you know, historical, they’re set in the seventies – in the Whitlam era, which is obviously a very politically charged moment in Australian history, and a moment that a lot of leftists, like me, in Australia tend to romanticise, in a potentially nostalgic way. So it was really interesting to research that period and try to recreate scenes from that era, and to get the feedback from people – mainly women from that era who had been alive then and seemed to really engage with those scenes in particular – and hear that something about them really resonated, so that was really heartening to know.
And you know, I really thought it was very moving that a lot of readers who were a bit younger and were struggling with a certain sense of precarity, which of course I’ve struggled with at various points through my life. And a lot of the novel is in conversation with the economic realities of how difficult it is to be a writer in our neo-liberal economies, so it was really nice to engage with readers from different ages, from different backgrounds, and I think that was something I’d like to carry over into my work in the future, which is to write novels that have a sort of wider appeal.
Teddy: Yeah, beautiful. So, we can expect the same readership for the next novel then, hopefully?
Dominic: Hopefully!
Teddy: And what does winning The Readings Prize mean for you and your writing, as you are going forward?
Dominic: Well obviously, it’s just, you know, an incredible thrill, it’s a huge honour. Whenever I come back to Australia, the first place that I go is Readings on Lygon Street – I have to go and get a big stack of books. So, to be recognised by an institution – not in the boring sense, but in the historical sense, a place that has been at the centre of Melbourne’s literary culture for as long as I’ve known what the literary culture was – it’s really moving and an incredible honour.
And the money is great and really helpful, but the idea that this prize in particular is going to help get the book into more readers’ hands is such an amazing opportunity and I’m really thankful to not only the judges but the booksellers and the staff at Readings who have been so great at getting the book out there from the first day – I had my launch at Readings and from the first day the book was out, they’ve been such a dream and so helpful at getting the book into the world, so I can’t thank you and Readings and everybody enough!
Listen to the rest of the interview on The Readings Podcast!
Teddy Peak works at Readings Carlton and was the chair of judges for The Readings New Australian Fiction Prize 2025.
Dominic Amerena is an Australian writer whose work has been recognised by many prizes, scholarships and grants. He has a PhD from RMIT University and he lives between Melbourne and Athens, Greece. I Want Everything is his debut novel.
