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MIN READ
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2026 Penguin Literary Prize! What does being shortlisted mean to you and what can you share about your shortlisted manuscript?
Being shortlisted is a wonderful validation of your writing. For me, good writing isn’t so much about offering definitive answers as asking pertinent questions, and for many good writers, writing should be filled with doubt, even when the work seems to ‘write itself.’ It’s that doubt that compels you to keep revising – but can also make you wonder if you’re doing the right thing at all. So it’s been really heartening to be shortlisted – but what’s been even more amazing has been all the lovely good wishes from so many of my writing peers, including some of Australia’s best-known authors, who have been so kind to me over the course of my career.
an allergy is written as a kind of memoir, interspersed with short stories – or case histories, as the narrator’s doctor father calls them – based on some of the most interesting cases in his long and distinguished career, such as the woman who starts speaking in foreign accents, despite never leaving the District; the Siamese twins who fall in love with the same girl; the man whose love of carrots turns him another colour; the face-blind family who don’t recognise each other; and the man who becomes allergic to the love of his life. Each of them maps a different part of the body, as it describes a different kind of love.
And that summer, after their elder brother stops singing, as their parents’ marriage falls apart, and a panther stalks the hills outside town, that narrator learns a lot about love. And discovers more than they want to know.
What inspired you to begin a writing career?
I started really writing when I started writing an allergy! After being hospitalised for a double knee reconstruction, I tripped on my first day out of bed and required ten more operations. I ended up being stuck in bed for nearly six months, and during that time I set myself the task of reading every Booker Prize winner from Schindler’s Ark to Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
When I got to the passage in The English Patient that read ‘the shadow fell upon his face like a pool of crushed grapes,’ I knew wasn’t going to keep reading The English Patient, and perhaps I could write something for myself to keep me occupied. I started with a story I’d jotted down in my diary the year before, about a man allergic to the love of his life, and ended up writing about 40,000 words in six weeks.
Some people write books because they’re inspired by the writers and books they love; I was definitely inspired by Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda and the luminescent work of the late, great Robert Gray, whose poem ‘Diptych,’ about his parents – and his generosity and mentorship of me over the years – was the greatest inspiration for the book.
But I wrote an allergy because I wanted to read something that hadn’t been written, and so I realised I had to write it myself.
Like many emerging writers, I was always too embarrassed to call myself a writer – even now, I say I’m ‘an adequate speller.’ But it is nice to see your work on AustLit – now available for free to ASA members – and see the collection of publications on your bookshelf and think, yes, I have written, I am a writer!
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
Dorothy Parker once wrote about Robert Benchley’s aversion to bookshops: ‘His trouble came from a great and gruelling compassion. It was no joy to him to see lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, “There–I’ve done it! I have written THE book. Now it and I are famous forever.” Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams.’
The prolific, successful, and wealthy author Georges Simenon observed that ‘writing is a vocation of disappointment’ – partly because good writers are assiduous editors, and always seeking to improve their work – but also because if you become a writer expecting fame or fortune, you’ll be disappointed.
So why write? George Orwell famously wrote about the reasons writers write – and after having written for most of my life – I wish I’d known that despite the inevitable rejections, and lack of money, and occasional lapses of hope or motivation, that – at least for me – there’s nothing else I’d rather do. The great organisational psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly studied the phenomenon of ‘flow’ – doing something challenging that pushes you outside of your comfort zone yet feels totally effortless, where you lose all sense of time and place because you’re so totally immersed in it. Reading and writing are the two things in my life where that can happen.
So what do I wish I’d known at the start of my career? Don’t tell anyone you’re writing a novel – you won’t hear the end of ‘how’s the novel going?’ Write every day, even when you don’t think you can. Don’t give up. The only difference between failure and success is just getting up one more time than you get knocked down – whether it’s a blank page or another revision or another rejection: just keep on. You never know when you’ll be shortlisted or published, and even if your work isn’t received well at first, it may one day be considered a classic (as happened to no less than The Great Gatsby, which was pilloried on publication but is now considered THE great American novel).
Which Australian authors or illustrators have been influential for you?
So many! Randolph Stowe, Sumner Locke Elliott, ASA founder Dal Stivens, Peter Carey, Kylie Tennant, Tom Keneally, Melissa Lukashenko, Alexis Wright, Helen Garner, and the poet Robert Gray, whose poem ‘Diptych’ inspired an allergy.
I’m also incredibly lucky to count a number of great Australian writers as friends and mentors. I remember going to my first ever book launch at Better Read Than Dead for Linda Jaivin’s breakout book Eat Me, and thinking how amazing it was to be that close to a writer. Since then, I’ve met and befriended many great Australian writers, and meet many more through my membership of the ASA, and in my work as Events Manager for iconic Sydney bookshop Gleebooks.
One thing I love about Australian writing is that no other literature can articulate what it feels like and means to be Australian. Not just the bonzer vernacular, or that iridescent light, or the smell of the trees, or the tang of the surf, or all the other myriad things we all just feel when we step out of the airport and know we’re home.
Why are you a member of the ASA?
I love the ASA! Many writers – especially emerging writers – know all too well the ‘loneliness of the long distance runner.’ Writing is a solitary art. I’ve often wondered at the irony of how I isolate myself from the people I love to spend so much time with imaginary characters, so that people I’ll never likely meet can isolate themselves from the people they love to spend time with those same imaginary characters, just so we can vicariously connect via them.
And that’s without the isolation of not having your work published, or the other myriad tribulations of the writing life – the doubt, the block, the lack of income…
So the ASA and its wonderful team are a powerful and essential support for all Australian writers – whether through its brilliant professional development and advisory services, its regular networking and literary speed dating, its advocacy to government, and connections to the publishing industry, its support of writers to deliver workshops, assess manuscripts, mentor emerging authors, or its many fellowships and grants. Outside of a great agent and publisher – and maybe a mini fox terrier – there’s no better friend to Australian writers than the ASA, and I’m very proud to be a member.
Find out more about Sunil Badami at sunilbadami.com.
