![]() ![]() ![]() She also very consciously features characters she herself describes as ordinary, because these are people she relates to and emphathises with. In an interview with Helen Garner, Kennedy admits she deliberately avoids “the whole confessional thing, where you’re always taking your own emotional temperature”. It’s a pared back voice that paradoxically draws the reader into an intimate appreciation of the dilemma being faced by each story’s characters. In other words it’s accessible, it doesn’t aim to express elevated theories or obscure themes or show off with elaborate metaphorical flights of fancy. But it’s also because of her style, which is what’s been described as understated realism. This is partly because Kennedy’s specialty (if that word can be used in this context) is the domestic realm. It’s no surprise that Cate Kennedy’s stories have such appeal, especially to women I suspect, because most readers can easily identify with the protagonists and the situations in which they find themselves. It contains 15 stories in which she takes the ordinary lives of everyday people and subjects them to a compassionate scrutiny that reveals the turbulence beneath the ostensibly unremarkable surfaces of those lives. It won the Queensland Steele Rudd Literary Award 2013 for an Australian short story collection and was short listed for the 2013 Stella Prize. “Like a House on Fire”published in 2012 is her second collection of short stories. Cate Kennedy is one of Australia’s most respected and accomplished short story writers. ![]()
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