Award-nominated author scorns the arrogance of Writer’s Block.
The novelist Robert Barclay heaps scorn on the oft-quoted complaint of Writer’s Block, describing it as “an arrogance only affecting writers who know they’ve written a bad story” in a wide-ranging interview with Katherine Touminen.
The author, who writes literary fiction, discusses issues ranging from genre fiction, the sources of inspiration, and paying due homage to past writers.
Robert Barclay is the first author in Australia to explore the very personal predicaments that Chinese women of the new millennium are facing in a new century.
‘I wanted to write character-driven love stories (more than just romantic love stories) to bring to life the almost unknown tragedies of our contemporary world, through inventing women who would emerge symbolising the transition of Chinese-Australian women in general who are still locked into cultural pieties as most westerners are not.
‘My books tell stories with a social issues backstory. The first, The Diary of Katy Yehonala, is set in the emergence of China from its revolutionary past; the second, The Girl in the Orphanage, is involved with child sex trafficking, and the third, Cassie’s Song, with the price of beauty and the destruction of rainforests in Kalimantan.’
Throughout “The Butterfly Dynasty” series, two Chinese-Australian women, Katy and Clara Yehonala, mirror the culture they came from — China — and the two women find their way in the world more or less successfully against the backdrop of monumental social issues.
‘Life today holds a great many challenges specific to Chinese women living outside China.’
Robert Barclay lived in China for several years and retains close ties to the people and to Cambodia with children’s charitable work. He is one of the first Australian authors to explore themes of Chinese women as they seek to mould a future, taking the best from their past and creating an innovative picture to carry them successfully into the centuries ahead.
All the books in the series can be purchased HERE
