Maria Takolander

Oct 18, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Maria Takolander

Legend has it that a female pope, disguised as a man, ruled the Vatican during the Middle Ages. While modern historians have discredited the story – based largely on the fact the Vatican’s enemies never weaponised what would have been a monumental scandal – the story of Pope John’s/Joan’s reign has sometimes been taken as fact. The idea of the female pope has captured imaginations since at least the 13th century.

Sep 24, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Maria Takolander |Arts Highlights

John Kinsella may well be Australia’s most prolific author – of poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction. His extensive body of work is renowned for its obsessive concern, its fixation even, with a single place: the Western Australian wheatbelt,  where Kinsella has spent most of his life. While psychoanalysis has fallen out of favour, Kinsella’s regionalism has the character of a repetition compulsion, a syndrome Freud related to unresolved trauma.

Aug 2, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Maria Takolander

Feminism and fantasy have a winning history, as demonstrated by Angela Carter’s celebrated collection of revisionary fairytales, The Bloody Chamber (1979), or the ground-breaking television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). As the latter suggests, they often meet in the YA space. Courtney Collins’ Bird, while not marketed as YA fiction, will appeal to the youthful, distinguished as it is by teenage protagonists, fast-paced storytelling and an immersive use of second-person narration.

Jul 26, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Maria Takolander

Sophie Matthiesson’s debut novel, Together We Fall Apart, is another contribution to the genre of feminine middle-class melodrama in Australian fiction, the growing appetite for which might be bound up with the rise of book groups. This type of book is characterised by a well-educated, professional female protagonist and a plot centred on individual romance and familial challenges, with the latter most typically involving the death of a parent.

Jul 19, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Maria Takolander

Science fiction is often concerned with reproduction, which is typically figured as an incursion of the alien upon the human – exemplified by the horrific inseminations and chest-cracking faux-births in that classic of science-fiction cinema, Alien (1979). Mothers and motherhood are common themes in these films, as we see in the second instalment of the Alien franchise, in which the androgynous hero Ripley faces off against a grisly, extra-terrestrial, egg-laying mother.