- Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran. Ultimo, $34.99.
Shankari Chandran is faintly amused to be asked about her anger.
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It seems this isn't the first time she's been asked where it comes from - this burning sense of injustice and unfairness in the world, that burns bright in her novels.
The last time she was asked, she says, it was about whether writers should always write from "a place of anger".
"I was like, well, I'm 49 and I have four children. I'm working two jobs. I'm always going to be angry. I'm just always angry. It's my demographic," she says, laughing.
She's deep into the publicity phase of her latest novel, Safe Haven, a process that has never sat well with her introverted personality.
But having won the Miles Franklin Award for her last novel, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, heightened interest in her work is a given.
The win took many by surprise, not least the author herself. The novel, quaintly titled with the promise of a soothing and cosy fireside tale, was instead a stealthy and fiery commentary on modern Australian society.
Set mainly in a nursing home in western Sydney, the story crossed between generations, cultures, time periods and continents - a multi-layered textured take on history, family, displacement, belonging, ageing, race relations and community.
It was, she said at the time, intended to be a last-ditch attempt at a writing career, after two novels and an unpublished manuscript had failed to make a ripple on the literary scene. A corporate lawyer working in the human rights space, she put aside all thoughts of publication, and just wrote.
Winning the Miles Franklin was vindicating; she was writing, after all, about her own people, and her own Tamil background, with parents who left Sri Lanka in the 1970s ahead of what would become a long-running civil war.
Chandran grew up in tiny white Canberra, and moved to London in her early 20s. Returning to Australia in 2009 with three children and another on the way, she was aghast at how strongly the country was in the grip of racist rhetoric and xenophobia.
Safe Haven focuses on a different set of questions about our core beliefs as Australians, set partly in Port Camden, a fictional off-shore detention centre that closely resembles Christmas Island. The protagonist is Serafina, a Sri Lankan Catholic nun, who has arrived there on a sinking boat, and eventually settles in a nurturing NSW community.
But the traumas of her past, and what she has seen at the detention centre, are hard to shake off, and she is punished and arrested for speaking out for those being detained on the island indefinitely.
"With this novel, and with the last one, and indeed, I think with all of my novels to date, it all starts from a place of anger and something that I am confused about and am trying to understand," she says.
It's her own anger she's interrogating as much as anything; it's not a productive emotion, and one that needs to be worked through - a fine metaphor for society at large.
And while Port Camden is portrayed as a forbidding black hole of psychological trauma, set against the paradoxical backdrop of physical beauty, she's less interested in interrogating Australia's off-shore detention policies.
She is a lawyer, after all, accustomed to providing solutions, rather than demanding answers to intractable problems. For her, the tension resides in how ordinary Australians grapple, if they do at all, with what's being done to traumatised people in our name. Are we as cold-hearted as the Australian government would like us to be when it comes to asylum seekers?
She still remembers how little people seemed to be asking about the refugees coming into Australia from, say, Sri Lanka.
But she was also particularly interested in the Queensland town of Biloela, where a Tamil couple settled and started a family before being refused refugee status in 2018. The community rallied around them and, after a four-year campaign, the government eventually granted the family bridging visas.
"I was really inspired by the ways in which that community loved them so much and was so brave in their advocacy for them, and was really just going hard," she says.
"I want people to take away the fact that from time to time in our political narrative, there is a particular story that is told [to] us and at the same time, quietly, there is a particular story that is happening every day in Australia - the story of Australians that don't agree with that political narrative, and have it deeply within them ... to live and to act with enormous humanity, respect and compassion for other people.
"It's a challenge to remember what it's like when we are our best selves."
- Shankari Chandran will be in conversation with Karen Viggers on May 13 at Kambri. See anu.edu.au/events