Transtasman Literary Imaginaries: Stories from a Cross-Border region

What is the role of literature in the Transtasman region? Brigid Magner shows us the richness and variety of the Transtasman literary region, which extends between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, including lutruwita/Tasmania. She draws attention to the region’s quiet persistence despite its apparent fragmentation across national borders. By performing close readings of contemporary texts in which the shared boundary of Te Tai-o-Rēhua/Tasman Sea features powerfully, Magner illuminates what these works of fiction ‘know’ about life in this cross-border zone, with topics ranging from deportation and abortion, to coercive control and shearing.

The featured authors treat Transtasman mobility as textually meaningful and gesture towards a literary world that is hidden in plain sight. The literary forms they employ both reflect and in some cases create connections that move beyond their nations of origin. This book offers new understandings of the ways in which Transtasman literary works may be downplayed, ignored, or claimed by one nation, instead of being seen from a more generative transnational perspective.

In The Transtasman Literary Region Brigid Magner re-imagines, through lenses provided by a close reading of a dozen literary texts, the sea boundary between Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia as permeable, indeed porous, ambiguous, and sometimes dangerous too. It is a ground-breaking work which introduces us to something more fluid, generative and unpredictable than the brittle pieties of nation states with their borders and their bureaucracies: a living membrane through which people, books and ideas pass and repass, exchanging intelligence - Martin Edmond, New Zealand writer and independent scholar

Brigid Magner grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand and now lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She is Associate Professor of Literary Studies and Co-Director of the non/fictionLab at RMIT University. Her book Locating Australian Literary Memory was published in 2020.