Maria Tumarkin

Maria Tumarkin is an Australian cultural historian, essayist and novelist, and is Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, teaching creative writing.[1][2]

Maria Tumarkin
Nationality	Australian
Occupation	Author, cultural historian

Biography

Tumarkin was born and raised in Kharkov, then part of the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine.[3] She left her home in 1989 when she was a teenager, before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.[4] She holds a BA (Hons) and a PhD in cultural history from the University of Melbourne.[1]

She writes books of ideas, reviews, essays and pieces for performance.[2] She was an Honorary Artistic Outreach Associate (2015–2016) at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and a co-creator, with Moya McFadzean, of "The Unending Absence" project.[1]

Works

Books

• Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (2005)[5]
• Courage (2007)
• Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter (2010)
• Axiomatic (2018)

Essays (selected)

• This Narrated Life (Griffith Review, 1 May 2014)[6]
• No Skin (2 September 2015)[7]
• Against Motherhood (20 October 2018)[8]

Awards

• Otherland was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, The Age Book of the Year, and NSW Premier’s Literary Award.
• No Skin was one of five finalists for the 2015 Melbourne Prize in Writing for essays shorter than 20,000 words.[9][10]
• Axiomatic won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Best Writing[11] and was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier's Prize for Nonfiction.[12] It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize.[13][14] and the 2019 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.[15]
• Winner of the 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize[16]

References

1. "Maria Tumarkin". Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
2. "Maria Tumarkin". Retrieved 8 April 2019.
3. Wood, Charlotte (23 July 2005). "Traumascapes". The Age.
4. Dessaix, Robert (19 April 2010). "Otherland: A Journey with My Daughter". Sydney Morning Herald.
5. Wood, Charlotte (23 July 2005). "Traumascapes". The Age.
6. Taylor, Anna Frey (31 July 2014). "Why This American Life falls short for writer Maria Tumarkin". ABC Australia.
7. "A selection of my recent essays". Maria Tumarkin. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
8. "'Against Motherhood Memoirs', Dangerous Ideas about Mothers". Maria Tumarkin. Retrieved 8 April 2019. Extract from Dangerous Ideas about Mothers, edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson.
9. Steger, Jason (2 September 2015), "Five writers vie for $60,000 Melbourne Prize", Sydney Morning Herald, retrieved 11 July 2016
10. Where are all the great Australian essays?, 24 February 2016, Sydney Morning Herald
11. "Lester wins $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature; Tumarkin wins Best Writing Award". Books+Publishing. 15 November 2018. Retrieved 7 January 2019.
12. "Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2019 shortlists announced". Books+Publishing. 12 December 2018. Retrieved 12 December 2018.
13. Nelson, Camilla (8 April 2019). "Stella prize 2019: your guide to the shortlist". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 April 2019. Co-published with The Conversation
14. Nelson, Camilla (8 April 2019). "Six books that shock, delve deeply and destroy pieties: your guide to the 2019 Stella Prize shortlist". The Converstation. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
15. Perkins, Cathy (Summer 2019). "Excellence in Literature and History". SL Magazine. 12 (4): 52–55.
16. Alice, Jessica (19 March 2020). "Maria Tumarkin on winning the 2020 Windham Campbell: 'It feels like a complicated gift'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 20 March 2020.

External links

• Personal Site