In Melbourne's western suburbs, in a dilapidated block of flats overhanging the rattling Footscray train lines, a young black mother is working on a collection of stories.
The book is called Foreign Soil. Inside its covers, a desperate asylum seeker is pacing the hallways of Sydney's notorious Villawood detention centre, a seven-year-old Sudanese boy has found solace in a patchwork bike, an enraged black militant is on the warpath through the rebel squats of 1960s Brixton, a Mississippi housewife decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to save her son from small-town ignorance, a young woman leaves rural Jamaica in search of her destiny, and a Sydney schoolgirl loses her way.
The young mother keeps writing, the rejection letters keep arriving . . .
'Maxine Beneba Clarke is the real deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come.' Dave Eggers
Author Biography
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and slam poetry champion of Afro-Caribbean descent. She is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Gil Scott Heron is on Parole and Nothing Here Needs Fixing. Her debut short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the Victorian Premier's Award Unpublished Manuscript Award (2013), the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction (2015) and the Australian Book Industry Award for Literary Fiction Book of The Year (2015). Foreign Soil was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Australian Women's writing (2015). Corsair will publish her memoir The Hate Race in 2016.
