"I will tell you why you should draft my story. Because migrant stories are broken. Some parts in a village where we washed our clothing with soot. Some parts in big cities working in factories. How we starved for food in Greece and starved for Greece in Australia."
And so Peter Polites does tell his mother's story. A story of the beautiful village of her birth, the island of her birth, the island she came to, and all the aspects of her migrant journey and life. How a son cannot see his mother as a woman who has "had a thousand lives before you were even a thought".
God Forgets About the Poor is a nuanced, thoughtful and richly evoked portrait of a woman, and the migrant experience, written to Polites' typically creative style and structure.
“Polites’ book is a triumphant reclamation, written in prose clean as polished stones but consciously bearing something of the occasional awkwardness and inadvertent poetry of his mother’s bilingualism. God may forget about the poor, but Polites evidently does not. He has rescued his mother’s modest story and made it into a contemporary epic of homecoming.”
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Peter Polites is a novelist from Western Sydney. He has written two queer noirs, Down the Hume and The Pillars, which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award. He also won the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literature Prize for Fiction. In 2021 he was the ACT Writer in Residence at UNSW Canberra. Peter’s latest novel is a bio-fictional novel about his mother's migration from Greece and her trauma.
picture by Graham Lindesay
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian novelist, librettist, short-story writer, freelancer, and music collaborator whose most recent novel is My Heart is a Little Wild Thing. His war novel, Bodies of Men, was published in 2019, receiving a 2019 Canberra Critics Circle Award, among other accolades. In 2022, Nigel was named the ACT Artist of the Year.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we live and work, and recognise their unbroken connection to country. We pay our respects to elders past and present, and are privileged to continue the tradition of storytelling in this place.