Books by Sreedhevi Iyer
Jungle Without Water, 2018
This debut short story collection from an Australian author delves into the shifting boundaries a... more This debut short story collection from an Australian author delves into the shifting boundaries and human displacement of our era. Of Indian-Malaysian background, Sreedhevi Iyer is adept at locating tensions within her own diaspora while also casting a forensic eye on Australian social and cultural attitudes. A teacher of creative writing at RMIT and the University of Melbourne, Iyer has a gift for radiant prose, but also an astonishing range of voices, from simple riffs on backyard suburbia to the magic realism of a narrative told by a “divine” coconut. Her sharp wit and sense of irony keep stories of refugees, inter-racial tension and human prejudice profoundly in our sights.
Jungle Without Water and Other Stories is a collection that crosses borders and boundaries. Peopl... more Jungle Without Water and Other Stories is a collection that crosses borders and boundaries. People in these stories inhabit different stages of movement – those who have emigrated, those who want to, and those who regret it. The stories also depict our human prejudices around how we move from place to place and culture to culture. In “The Lovely Village” citizens of an unnamed settlement build a strong wall to keep newcomers out. In “Circular Feed”, refugees at a detention centre protest by standing on the roof of their living quarters. Alienation works across cultures, across boundaries of inequality. In “Green Grass” an inter-racial couple have a fight during their honeymoon in the husband’s homeland, while in the title story, two migrant boys look for the right place to pray on foreign soil. Altogether, the collection touches on how we view and understand race, colour, love, and what happens to us when we shift our selves in different environments.
“Sreedhevi Iyer deftly maps the human shifts of our time in a way few writers can, with an ear for the prejudices, accents and hopes we carry with us. This is clever, compelling twenty-first century writing, and we need more of it.” NICK EARLS
“Iyer is a wonderful storyteller, and this debut collection shows an incredible knack for locating and revealing fractures, faultlines and tensions – cultural, familial and historical – in any given moment.” BENJAMIN LAW
Papers by Sreedhevi Iyer
Digital together: Creative writing, collaborative residencies and cultural exchange in a COVID-constrained world
TEXT
‘Will the real writer please stand up’: Flawed discursive self-presentation by Junot Diaz
Writing & Pedagogy, 2019
As we enter the era of bullshitology, methods of evaluating ‘authenticity’ become even more neces... more As we enter the era of bullshitology, methods of evaluating ‘authenticity’ become even more necessary. Celebrity writers of color, like all writers, have to present themselves as themselves in literary discourse. However, due to the discursive tendency to pigeonhole authors of color, such authors instead construct a public persona to negotiate the paradoxical position they inhabit within the discourse. Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, presents himself differently across different communicative contexts, by indexing existing metapragmatic stereotypes regarding the ‘authentic’ author. The results emerge as demonstrating Diaz’s style-shifts that occur according to the size of the communicative contexts. The smaller the communicative platform, the more Diaz assuredly resists pigeonholing. Similarly, the larger the platform, the more Diaz capitulates towards pre-determined discursive labels. Such an outcome underlines the challenge contemporary authors face in order to remain viable and exert influence over prevailing cultural conversations.
Southeast Asian Review of English, 2019
The postcolonial writer and the translator of literary works possess similar literary challenges.... more The postcolonial writer and the translator of literary works possess similar literary challenges. Both are required to explicate unfamiliar elements from an original cultural source or text in a way that is comprehensible to a contemporary global audience. However, for the postcolonial writer this can amount to a certain didactic quality to the literary work, which is a devalued aesthetic within contemporary literary standards. As such, the writer incorporates translative elements in his creative process to get around the problem. To demonstrate this, I analyze and compare the works of two authors, Raja Rao and Eileen Chang. I argue that Rao's incorporation of the Kannada language into Kanthapura strategically resists prevailing standards of cultural explication, while Eileen Chang's initial draft of Lust, Caution, written in English as The Spyring, engages in overt cultural explication that fails to capture the nuances of its translated version. The intentional construct of linguistic and aesthetic permutations in both works can be characterized as an act of translation.
Fragments of Mirrors
This Research Masters comprises of a creative project, a novel titled Fragments of Mirrors, and a... more This Research Masters comprises of a creative project, a novel titled Fragments of Mirrors, and a critical essay titled The Deterritorialisation of ‘Home’ in the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie and R.K. Narayan. The critical essay resembles a postcolonial literary studies paper. I examine the complication of the traditional concept of ‘home’, due to Indian migration and diaspora and it’s resulting consequences on migrant identity. I suggest, through the examination of the works of authors of Indian origin, that ‘home’ for migrants has become an imaginary construct. The texts are Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Mrs Sen’s, Mr Pirzada Came to Dine, and This Blessed House, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Shame, and R.K. Narayan’s The Guide, The Vendor of Sweets, The Painter of Signs, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, Waiting for the Mahatma, The Financial Expert, Mr Sampath, Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of A...
Cosmopolitan Creative Writing pedagogies
Teaching Creative Writing in Asia
Book Review: Dan Disney (ed.), Exploring Second Language Creative Writing: Beyond Babel
Language and Literature, 2016
Southeast Asian Review of English
On not writing back: Cosmopolitan paradoxes in new diasporic Malaysian writing today
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to refle... more In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to reflect on emerging issues in their writing practice as deterritorialized writers with connections to Malaysia. Unlike earlier generations of post-independence writers, neither Lee nor Iyer “writes back” to the former colonial centre nor, despite their designation as “Malaysian writers” by commercial publishers, do they “write back” to their condition as sectional writers in the Malaysian literary canon. Instead, taking on a confessional mode, the two writers examine the paradox of their cosmopolitan sensibilities in an age of deterritorialized national literatures. Iyer reflects on her story collection Jungle Without Water, and her use of vernacular Malaysian English to transcend cultural explication, while Lee draws on his poetry collection Beds in the East to suggest how a double perspective that pivots between Malaysia and the UK can strategically mediate the colonial/postcolonial gaze.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2021
In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to refle... more In this article, two contemporary writers, Jason Eng Hun Lee and Sreedhevi Iyer, combine to reflect on emerging issues in their writing practice as deterritorialized writers with connections to Malaysia. Unlike earlier generations of post-independence writers, neither Lee nor Iyer “writes back” to the former colonial centre nor, despite their designation as “Malaysian writers” by commercial publishers, do they “write back” to their condition as sectional writers in the Malaysian literary canon. Instead, taking on a confessional mode, the two writers examine the paradox of their cosmopolitan sensibilities in an age of deterritorialized national literatures. Iyer reflects on her story collection Jungle Without Water, and her use of vernacular Malaysian English to transcend cultural explication, while Lee draws on his poetry collection Beds in the East to suggest how a double perspective that pivots between Malaysia and the UK can strategically mediate the colonial/postcolonial gaze.
Writing and Pedagogy, 2019
As we enter the era of bullshitology, methods of evaluating 'authenticity' become even more neces... more As we enter the era of bullshitology, methods of evaluating 'authenticity' become even more necessary. Celebrity writers of color, like all writers, have to present themselves as themselves in literary discourse. However, due to the discursive tendency to pigeonhole authors of color, such authors instead construct a public persona to negotiate the paradoxical position they inhabit within the discourse. Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, presents himself differently across different communicative contexts, by indexing existing metapragmatic stereotypes regarding the 'authentic' author. The results emerge as demonstrating Diaz's style-shifts that occur according to the size of the communicative contexts. The smaller the communicative platform, the more Diaz assuredly resists pigeonholing. Similarly, the larger the platform, the more Diaz capitulates towards predetermined discursive labels. Such an outcome underlines the challenge contemporary authors face in order to remain viable and exert influence over prevailing cultural conversations.
Southeast Asian Review of English, 2019
The postcolonial writer and the translator of literary works possess similar literary challenges.... more The postcolonial writer and the translator of literary works possess similar literary challenges. Both are required to explicate unfamiliar elements from an original cultural source or text in a way that is comprehensible to a contemporary global audience. However, for the postcolonial writer this can amount to a certain didactic quality to the literary work, which is a devalued aesthetic within contemporary literary standards. As such, the writer incorporates translative elements in his creative process to get around the problem. To demonstrate this, I analyze and compare the works of two authors, Raja Rao and Eileen Chang. I argue that Rao’s incorporation oftheKannada language into Kanthapura strategically resists prevailing standards of cultural explication, while Eileen Chang’s initial draft of Lust,Caution, written in English as The Spyring, engages in overt cultural explication that fails to capture the nuances of its translated version. The intentional construct of linguistic and aesthetic permutations in both workscan be characterized as an act of translation.
The Writers Chronicle, 2018
Creative Output by Sreedhevi Iyer
Asia Literary Review, 2016
TEXT SPECIAL ISSUES The in / completeness of human experience, 2020
Covid Fiction
"I.C.", Everything About Us, Readings from Readings 3
"I'm Walking Here", Asia Literary Review
Blog
"Something Else", Asia Literary Review
Blog
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Books by Sreedhevi Iyer
“Sreedhevi Iyer deftly maps the human shifts of our time in a way few writers can, with an ear for the prejudices, accents and hopes we carry with us. This is clever, compelling twenty-first century writing, and we need more of it.” NICK EARLS
“Iyer is a wonderful storyteller, and this debut collection shows an incredible knack for locating and revealing fractures, faultlines and tensions – cultural, familial and historical – in any given moment.” BENJAMIN LAW
Papers by Sreedhevi Iyer
Creative Output by Sreedhevi Iyer