Geraldine Brooks, fresh from winning this year's Pulitzer Prize for her novel March, and fellow author Melina Marchetta arrive in Shanghai looking only a shade bewildered by the city's bustle.
Mainland readers are set for a double dose of raw Australian literary talent as the People's Literature Publishing House releases Chinese versions of Brooks' Year of Wonders and Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi.
Under the high beams of the Glamour Bar at M on the Bund, the pair talk about their novels, old and new, as the setting sun throws gold bars across the wooden floor.
'I feel very Australian,' says Brooks later. 'When I go back to Sydney, there's no doubt. The light, the pure blue sky, how the rocks kind of emerge through the landscape like ribs, the way the trees lose bark, not leaves. I miss it.' So why is the Australian- born Brooks drawn to such far-removed settings as a village beset by plague in 17th century England in Year of Wonders, or the civil war-ravaged American south of March?
Brooks attributes it to what she calls her colonised imagination. As a child, she read British authors such as Enid Blyton and found it easier to hear those far away voices. 'There's a sort of literary Stockholm syndrome at work.'
Year of Wonders was born during breaks in the English countryside. In the middle of one tramp, she chanced on Plague Village and its extraordinary story, and found questions raging inside her.
