Marion May Campbell

Throughout her work Marion May Campbell has tried to challenge the politics of representation through a poetics of resistance, often exploring identification as potential agency for her characters. Her novels include Lines of Flight, Not Being Miriam, Prowler, Shadow Thief, and konkretion. According to Andrew McCann, “Part of what makes [konkretion] so fascinating is its ambiguous relationship to questions of national context and culture. […] In its political and aesthetic complexity, in its desire to interrupt the anti-intellectualism of Australian intellectual life, it might be out of step with its time, but then its very untimeliness might also be the surest sign of its relevance.”

Trans-generic experimentation, and a propensity towards a performative feminist and queer poetics, have been key concerns of all Marion’s work, as manifest in her fictocritical essays, the cross-genre collection Fragments from a Paper Witch, and Poetic Revolutionaries: Intertextuality & Subversion (Rodopi, 2014). Her experimental memoir The Man on the Mantelpiece (UWA Publishing) and poetry collection third body (Whitmore Press) appeared in 2018. Marion supervises graduate writing projects concerned with resistance and social transformation.