Loading...
Explore the program
Festival month has arrived! But before the Festival officially kicks off, we want to introduce you to some of the participants who have travelled from near and far to discuss their books, writing and ideas with us. Throughout this Q&A series, get to know favourite and unfamiliar writers and consider the 2025 theme, In This Together.
Dominic Amerena is an Australian writer whose debut novel, I Want Everything explores the cost of creative ambition through desire and deception's tangled webs.
What inspired your debut novel, I Want Everything?
My novel is about the parasitic relationship between my narrator, an ambitious young writer and a reclusive cult author, Brenda Shales. He is determined to become the next, great Austalian writer and will do terrible things to get what he wants.
I was very interested in the long history of Australian literary hoaxes and scandals, from the Ern Malley Affair, to John Hughes’s infamous theft. So much of Australian literary history is bound up with a feeling of fraudulence and inauthenticity, and I wanted to find out why. So when my narrator steals his idol’s story, he is participating in this country’s troubling literary lineage, which I attempted to dramatise in a fun and thrilling way.
Who are your greatest literary inspirations?
For the character of Brenda Shales, I had to create an entire literary backstory, and I had great fun doing it. When I imagined the books she wrote, they might read something like The Well, Jolley’s dark and mysterious masterpiece.
Janet Frame’s shadow looms large over I Want Everything – not just present in the echoes in Brenda Shales’s story – but because of the kind of writer Frame is, singularly herself, as we all should strive to be.
When I was trying to perfect Brenda Shales's cadence and diction, I found myself returning to Helen Garner’s wonderful diaries. Her laconic charm, her fondness for Aussie-English, her bolshie no-nonsense way of living. Without Helen Garner there would be no Brenda Shales, and I can’t thank her enough.
What’s on your TBR pile now?
Audition by Katie Kitamura – I’ve long admired her work, and my novel was recently compared to it. I need to see what I’m up against.
Paro by Namita Gokhale, a spiky skewering of the Indian bourgeoisie in the 1980s. Hilarious and brilliantly observed and not talked about enough.
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar, Nightingale by Laura Elvery, First Year by Kristina Ross, Half Truth by Nadia Mahjouri and You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson. One of the nicest things about going on book tour is meeting so many other new or newish novelists whose books I can’t wait to get my hands on. Read them all (but read mine first!).
What is the first book you remember reading?
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl. A morally dubious character does something dodgy for personal advancement – what book does that remind me of?
What book do you wish you could read for the first time again?
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing – Marxism, motherhood, colonialism, sexcapades and psychoanalysis. What more could a reader want?
What events at this year’s Festival are you looking forward to attending?
My book wouldn’t exist without Helen Garner. I will try my darndest to get her to sign it. Can’t wait to see George Haddad and Ceridwen Dovey talk about home in No Place Like Home.
What do you hope readers take away from your work?
I just hope they have as much fun reading my novel, as I did writing it. It’s a wild ride that makes you think and squirm and chuckle (at least that’s the plan).