Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson is Kill Your Darlings’ Interviews Editor. He is a bookseller at Readings St Kilda, and the 2015 recipient of the ABA Penguin Random House Young Bookseller of the Year award. His writing has appeared in Best Australian Essays 2015, the Review of Australian Fiction and elsewhere. He is currently working on his first book, Something Flammable – a biography, of sorts, of the musician Rowland S. Howard – for Echo Publishing. @unnewsworthy (Tumblr)

More of their work

Conversation with Rebecca Starford & Hannah Kent

Conversation with Rebecca Starford & Hannah Kent

Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson talks to Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent about the origins of the magazine, their working relationship and what is in store for KYD in the future. Rebecca Starford and Hannah Kent are the founders and publishing directors of Kill Your Darlings [KYD]. From April 2017 KYD will be an entirely digital magazine, which […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Rebecca Starford & Hannah Kent

Conversation with Rebecca Starford & Hannah Kent

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Gerard Elson

Gerald Elson talks to Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien about China, recording history, and how classical music infuses writing. Beginning in Vancouver in 1991, Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a haunting portrait of multigenerational trauma and displacement. Li-ling – known throughout by her ‘English name’, Marie – is just ten years old […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Marie Darrieussecq

Conversation with Marie Darrieussecq

Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson speaks to French novelist Marie Darrieussecq about how she learnt to play with French language, Charlie Hebdo, and how psychoanalysis saved her life. Since she published her first novel, Truismes, in 1996 (English translation Pig Tales, 1997), Marie Darrieussecq has become a steady, notable figure in French literature. She is no stranger to […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Marie Darrieussecq

Conversation with Marie Darrieussecq

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Ann Goldstein

Conversation with Ann Goldstein

Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson speaks to Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante’s hugely successful Neapolitan novel series, about learning Italian later in life, and the difficulties and rewards of interpreting literature for English-speaking readers. For the past 20 years, Elena Ferrante – the nom de plume of an anonymous Italian writer – has offered up vicious examinations […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Ann Goldstein

Conversation with Ann Goldstein

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Tatiana Salem Levy

Conversation with Tatiana Salem Levy

Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson speaks to Brazilian novelist Tatiana Salem Levy about English-language translations, ‘national’ literature and the preservation of knowledge. The narrator of Tatiana Salem Levy’s The House in Smyrna (2015) lies on a bed in a room, its walls plagued by mildew; her body, by livid sores. Her limbs are withered. The profound weight of […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Tatiana Salem Levy

Conversation with Tatiana Salem Levy

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Lynn Coady

Conversation with Lynn Coady

Gerard Elson

Gerard Elson speaks with Canadian novelist and journalist Lynn Coady about the importance of opening scenes, life on literary juries and why maintaining a healthy cynicism is important. The epigram to Lynn Coady’s short-story collection Hellgoing (2013) comes from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’ (1955): For, though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Lynn Coady

Conversation with Lynn Coady

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Helen Macdonald

Conversation with Helen Macdonald

Gerard Elson

‘Writing about wild life and the environment has never been better or better informed than this.’ It was like this that Claire Tomalin, celebrated biographer of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Mary Wollstonecraft, announced Helen Macdonald as the 2014 recipient of the Samuel Johnson Prize for H is For Hawk. With a £20,000 prize, the […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Helen Macdonald

Conversation with Helen Macdonald

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Nick Cave

Conversation with Nick Cave

Gerard Elson

Each year it becomes trickier to say what Nick Cave is. In 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), a fantasia-like exploration of Cave’s imaginative practice by British filmmakers Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Cave doesn’t exactly clarify the matter, deadpanning in his opening narration: ‘At the end of the twentieth century, I ceased to be a […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Nick Cave

Conversation with Nick Cave

Gerard Elson

Conversation with Michel Faber

Conversation with Michel Faber

Gerard Elson

Michel Faber was born in The Hague in 1960, the only child to parents who each had children from previous marriages. In 1967 the Fabers relocated to Melbourne, mother and father spurred on by painful memories of the Second World War and a wish to divest responsibility for their elder children; in Australia they sought […]

Continue Reading More Interview

Conversation with Michel Faber

Conversation with Michel Faber

Gerard Elson