Stephen Daisley grew up in New Zealand, lives in Western Australia and has worked on sheep and cattle stations, oil and gas construction sites, and as a truck driver. His first novel, Traitor, won the 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and his second novel, Coming Rain (Text Publishing), is about a shearer and his daughter hoping for a better life in the WA wheatbelt.
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THE BONE PEOPLE
Keri Hulme
This work, probably because of the country of my birth, is my karakia (a song of spiritual guidance, prayer, lament and blessing). The Bone People allowed me to believe. It celebrated us.
THE DROVER'S WIFE
Henry Lawson
If I ever need to be reminded of the courage to write, I need look no further than the works and life of Henry Lawson and his story The Drover's Wife. Lawson felt the intense loneliness and grief of his being here, but instead of turning from this dread, he turned into it – like a moth into the blinding flame. This takes much courage and it was, I suggest, this fearlessness which also destroyed him. Russell Drysdale's painting, The Drover's Wife, is etched in my memory. If there was ever a Victoria Cross awarded for writing, Lawson would in my opinion deserve it.
AS I LAY DYING
William Faulkner
Faulkner is a writer I consider central to my own work, along with Steinbeck and Hemingway. The modernist use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness in the telling of this short novella is a revelation. It uses the vernacular of the time and place – 1930, Mississippi – and poor rural folk being all they can be. Faulkner's use of this language has such simple gravity that its authenticity takes your breath away.
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's intense use of language meets Emily Dickinson's definition of great art – that it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Consider the opening lines to All the Pretty Horses: "The candleflame and the image of the candleflame in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door." I have read all of McCarthy's work, and consider him the finest writer in the English language today.
