Theory & Practice

Title: Theory & Practice
Author: Michelle de Kretser
Publisher: Text Publishing

Shortlist: Fiction

It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

Judges’ report

Theory & Practice is a book that defies definition: radical and formal, personal and political, real and imagined. Set amidst the gritty bohemia of 1980s St Kilda, Michelle de Kretser seamlessly blends together fiction and memoir to give voice to the often devastating schisms between our ideals and our reality. When faced with the choice, what will win out: our morals, or our own self-interest? How should we think of our idols once they have been smashed from their pedestals? Has theory ruined art and literature for us all? With beauty and rigour, de Kretser captures the rawness of youth and the contradictions of living in all its complexity and richness.

Extract

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VPLA book photography by Sarah Walker