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Ryan O'Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart and Their Brilliant Careers. He was born in Glasgow in 1975 and has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.His fiction has appeared in Seizure, The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly. He was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and won the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction in 2017. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.
In his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious book he does something stunningly original using Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife-turning it into a bravura literary game using most of the sub-forms and styles of both popular culture and literary culture (Hemingwayesque, Joyceian etc.) and has also used many of the commonplace communication shapes which some of us use and experience daily-the tweet, the crossword, the slide presentation, the mixtape, trivia quiz- and he also uses some old,perhaps forgotten, sub-forms such as the lipogram, pangram, cento, scratch and sniff (1965)-I have never read a work like this before-it is also a perfect reference book and teaching aid for teachers and students of English by illustrating the rich variety of ways we play with and use the language-it is a cerebrally imaginative tour de force. -Frank Moorhouse In his supercalifragilisticexpialidocious book he does something stunningly original using Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife-turning it into a bravura literary game using most of the sub-forms and styles of both popular culture and literary culture (Hemingwayesque, Joyceian etc.) and has also used many of the commonplace communication shapes which some of us use and experience daily-the tweet, the crossword, the slide presentation, the mixtape, trivia quiz-and he also uses some old, perhaps forgotten, sub-forms such as the lipogram, pangram, cento, scratch and sniff (1965)-I have never read a work like this before-it is also a perfect reference book and teaching aid for teachers and students of English by illustrating the rich variety of ways we play with and use the language-it is a cerebrally imaginative tour de force. -- Frank Moorhouse
