Michael Wilding (writer)


Michael Wilding is a British writer and academic who has spent most of his career in Australia.
As an academic, he has had a distinguished career as a literary scholar, critic, and editor. Since the 1970s he has earned a reputation as an "important critic and scholar of Australian literature". From the late 1960s he was one of a group of prominent writers, editors and publishers who promoted the "new writing" movement in Australia.
By the 1970s he was writing his own "exciting and innovative fiction". To date he has published more than twenty novels and short story collections.

Life

Michael Wilding, novelist and critic, was born in Worcester, UK and read English at Oxford. He has taught English and Australian Literature and creative writing at the University of Sydney, where he is now emeritus professor, the University of Birmingham, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the National University of Singapore. He has also been a milkman, postman, apple-picker, newspaper columnist, Cosmopolitan Bachelor of the Month, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Chair of the New South Wales Writers' Centre. He has been translated and published in some 20 countries. His papers and manuscripts are held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. His correspondence with Christina Stead is in the National Library of Australia. There are portraits of him by Edgar Billingham and by Dimitri Lihachov in private collections. Central Independent Television UK made a documentary on his writing, Reading the Signs. For many years he was Australian editor of Stand, the UK quarterly edited by Jon Silkin and Lorna Tracy, introducing the work of Robert Adamson, Peter Carey and Vicki Viidikas to the UK. Wilding was a founding editor of the University of Queensland Press's Asian & Pacific Writing series, the innovative short story magazine Tabloid Story with Frank Moorhouse and Carmel Kelly, and of the publishers Wild & Woolley, and Paperbark Press. A critical study of his work, Michael Wilding and the Fiction of Instant Experience by Don Graham, was published by Teneo Press, Amherst and New York, in 2013. In 2015 he received the Colin Roderick award and the Prime Minister's Literary award for non-fiction for his Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall: a Documentary.

Work

His fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers, Review of Contemporary Fiction, London Magazine, Gangway, Granta, Stand, Bananas, Overland, Meanjin, Southerly, Quadrant, London Review of Books, San Francisco Review of Books, New Statesman, Essays in Criticism, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Oxford Review, Modern Language Review, Griffith Review, Nation Review, National Times, The Australian, The Bulletin, the Sydney Morning Herald and others.
His first novel, Living Together, was described by David Marr in The Bulletin as 'a very funny book and a perfect picture of the people, the time, the place'. Jan Meek wrote in Vogue Australia, 'He is so exhilaratingly adept with narrative you cannot put the book down... Wilding's pen is sharp as a rapier.' The San Francisco Review of Books hailed The Short Story Embassy, declaring Wilding was 'The best of the talent emerging from down under.' It was followed by Scenic Drive which was acclaimed in the USA: Dianna Pizza wrote in the L. A. Star: ‘Takes you on a trip that shouldn't be missed... I laughed until I cried. It's rare that I enjoy a book as much as I enjoyed Scenic Drive – it's a memorable book, sexy and funny. Once you read it, you'll want to turn all of your friends on to it.; And Dick Higgins commented in Newsart: 'Wilding is fast becoming a well-known figure to the US underground... It's first-rate fiction.'
After Pacific Highway Wilding published two documentary narratives, The Paraguayan Experiment, the story of the New Australia settlement, and Raising Spirits, Making Gold and Swapping Wives: The True Adventures of Dr John Dee & Sir Edward Kelly, which Peter Porter selected as one of The Economist Books of the Year: 'The story of Queen Elizabeth I's necromancer, John Dee, as transcribed from original documents interspersed with Michael Wilding's own words. A piece of esoterica designed to startle and delight the modern reader.' A third documentary, Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall, won the 2015 Colin Roderick award and the Prime Minister's Award for non-fiction.
Two autobiographical novels of the literary life followed—Wildest Dreams, an Australian Book of the Year, which, Adrian Caesar wrote, 'deserves to be thought of as a contemporary classic' and Wild Amazement.Bob Ellis wrote in Overland, 'What I think absorbs the reader in the deeply revelatory un-memoir Wild Amazement is... Michael's clear, almost hyper-real remembrance, as if experienced on a guided tour of a radiant, countercultural Disneyland, of a way of life, and a gravely joyous bohemia now gone, of how it was, and what a time it was, it really was, in Sydney in the sixties and seventies, in the Newcastle and the Journos' Club and the Push parties and the plans for a literary life.' And in Quadrant, Peter Corris wrote, 'Anyone interested in how contemporary Australian writing came to be the way it is, with its strengths and follies, its cliques and patrons, and the challenges it faces, will benefit from reading Wilding's sensitive, sometimes bitchy, often funny and always intelligent tracing of his life's trajectory.' The Italian translation of Wild Amazement appeared in 2009.
Between these two books Wilding wrote a best-selling campus novel, Academia Nuts. Laurie Taylor wrote in the Times Higher Educational Supplement: 'A witty campus novel? In 2004? It seemed as likely as a holiday romance set amid the tropical delights of Guantanamo Bay... But it is very funny. So funny that I had to stop reading it in bed in case my roars of laughter were disturbing the neighbours: so funny that it deserves to be the final great campus novel. It is unlikely to be challenged. For what Wilding's aged unreconstructed dons are playing with such absurd brio is unmistakably the last waltz.' A sequel, Superfluous Men, appeared in 2009.
National Treasure is a black comedy about the literary world. Christopher Bantick wrote in the Weekend Australian that it was 'witty and genuinely funny... Wilding's zesty writing and sheer fun with his subject makes for a diverting read. But don't be conned. This is fiction with more truth than lies.' 'Thoroughly enjoyable, sometimes hilarious,’ wrote Brian Matthews in the Australian Book Review, adding, ‘but it is not lightweight: it is tough, well-calculated, smoothly witty satire.' And Kerryn Goldsworthy wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: 'By the end of the novel we've realised why Plant is called Plant and we've seen perhaps more than we wanted to of the secret life of the successful Australian writer. Like Academia Nuts i's a fable about the relentless commercialisation of what used to be the life of the mind, at once very depressing and very funny.'
National Treasure is the pilot for the series of Plant private-eye novels, beginning with The Prisoner of Mount Warning. Peter Corris wrote: 'If this was as much fun to write as it is to read, Michael Wilding must have enjoying writing The Prisoner of Mount Warning. A take on the secret world, mainstream and underground journalism, Writers' Centres, the counter culture and much else, the book is a heady ride from Sydney to Byron Bay and the Gold Coast with Plant, resting writer, investigating something that might have happened but perhaps not. Wilding has created a world both funny and creepy for Plant and the reader.' Emma Young wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of The Magic Of It: 'The truth in this fiction is at least as entertaining as what has been invented... and a protagonist who surely will be back'; and Cameron Woodhead wrote in the same paper : 'Asian Dawn is a fast-paced read with lots of seedy sex and compromising secrets, plus a few well-aimed jabs at the academic world'. Derek Turner wrote in the Spectator Australia of In the Valley of the Weed that it 'brings to light a convoluted sexual life, and a mass of contradictions and enigmas about... modern academe, drug laws, the secret state, civil liberties, abuses of the internet, media bias, the literary world, and political correctness.' Peter Pierce wrote of Little Demon in the Weekend Australian, 'Wilding writes the Plant stories with apparent ease. At the same time, he dares those among us who are averse to conspiracy theories to wonder whether we have been too skeptical.' The most recent Plant novel is 'The Travel Writer'.
Wilding's first short story collection was Aspects of the Dying Process. He was hailed as 'one of the best writers of short stories in Australia today' by the Australian Book Review. 'The short story writer as sociologist, the short story writer as photo-realist,' wrote the Times Literary Supplement, adding 'Wilding can accurately pace a story and make a woman ironical and elusive in just a few sentences.' It was followed by the collections West Midland Underground, The Phallic Forest, Reading the Signs and This is for You. Under Saturn is a collection of four novellas, including the cult classic Campus Novel'.
There have been a number of selections from these volumes, including The Man of Slow Feeling, Book of the Reading and Great Climate, published in the US as Her Most Bizarre Sexual Experience. This was described as 'Erotic, fiercely intelligent and mordantly funny,' by Janette Turner Hospital. Jim Crace wrote 'His stories subvert and transcend not only sexual and social conventions... but story-telling itself.' And J. P. Donleavy commented: '21st century writing for 21st-century people.' Of the selection Somewhere New, Don Graham wrote: 'What strikes one first, apart from the impressive merits of individual stories, is Wilding's keen sense of literary integrity. Without being self-important or pretentious, Wilding's voice in these stories is always one to attend to: an ironic, witty, highly educated, and in its indirect way, passionate authorial persona who has believed in literature as a life of principle, has seen many of the bases of that belief assaulted by abstruse theory, trendy anti-realism, and sinecure-seeking cynicism, and yet still in the face of everything, is able to make the affirming act through the agency of fiction.... No one in English writes better fiction about the process of writing than Wilding.' 'Essential reading,' wrote Robert Yeo, in the Singapore Straits Times.
Michael Wilding's literary studies range from the seventeenth century to the present day. They include Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, and a reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost; two volumes on the political novel—Political Fictions and Social Visions; a study of Marcus Clarke, a selection of Marcus Clarke's writings and a reissue of Clarke's stories; andStudies in Classic Australian Fiction. He edited William Lane's The Workingman's Paradise and The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories. He was made a Doctor of Letters by the University of Sydney for his writings on literature in its social and political context.
Co-edited books include Australians Abroad, The Radical Reader, Air Mail from Down Under, the three volumes of Best Stories Under the Sun, Cyril Hopkins' Marcus Clarke, Heart Matters'' and an anthology of Australian fiction in Serbian translation.

Critical assessments

A festschrift in his honour, Running Wild: Essays, Fictions and Memoirs Presented to Michael Wilding, edited by David Brooks and Brian Kiernan, was published in 2004. It includes a number of essays on his fiction by Brian Kiernan, Laurie Hergenhan, Bruce Clunies Ross, Adrian Caesar and Robert Yeo. Other critical assessments include:
Serbo-Croatian translation by David Albahari, Decje Novine, Beograd, 1985
Punjabi translation by Tejpal Singh, Kition Nawan, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2001
Italian translation by Aldo Magagnino, Con Folle Stupore, Edizioni Controluce, 2008
Documentaries
Bengali translation by Geeta Sen, Papyrus, Calcutta, 1995.
Japanese translation by Sokushin Ezawa, Asahi Shimbun Publications, Tokyo, 2016