I’ve lived overseas for 12 years, the vast majority of my adult life. I visit Australia every year (global pandemics permitting), but I’m no longer allowed to vote. I consider Melbourne my hometown and brag about it relentlessly, but my accent has become hopelessly mangled. And though my nationality is the first line of my standard bio – Mikaella is an Australian writer based in Berlin – it’s rarely apparent in my actual writing.
My fiction already has a strange, hybrid quality; I write novels with my wife, Onjuli Datta, our two voices twining around one another with more than a decade’s worth of practice to create a shared language I step into as easily as my own. Onjuli is British, as is the heroine of our first novel, but if we were taking turns, I skipped mine.
Our second novel, Feast While You Can, takes place in an unnamed but clearly European country, in a fictional town of our own devising. And while there’s many of my qualities in our heroine Angelina – her brash ruthlessness, her gleeful lesbianism, a streak of optimism so vivid it becomes occasionally dangerous – my Australianness is not one of them.
If in our first novel, the lack of Australia was........