By Yong Shu Hoong

Adam Aitken was born in London, England, in 1960 to an Australian father and Thai mother. He spent part of his childhood in Thailand and Malaysia, before moving in 1968 to Australia, where he later graduated from the University of Sydney, and received his master's and doctorate degrees from University of Technology Sydney.

To call Aitken a well-travelled man or a global citizen would not be out of line. He is also an acclaimed author who has written poetry, essays on Asian Australian literature and book reviews, as well as co-edited the 2013 anthology, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets.

His poetry collections include In One House (1996), Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles (2000), which was runner-up for The Age Book of the Year poetry prize, and Eighth Habitation (2009), which was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award. His more recent publications are his memoir exploring his mixed heritage, One Hundred Letters Home (2016), which was long-listed for the ALS Gold Medal, and Archipelago (2017), which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

1. What are you reading right now?
Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser. A book about a Sri Lankan man and an Australian woman travelling from respective countries to the UK and other places.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Ariel in The Tempest. I like the freedom.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am successful.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
Living: I identify with the writer Suneeta Peres da Costa. We both have Asian-Australian backgrounds and an interest in French. We like Kafka, and food too. I love Marguerite Duras as she was a great writer of fiction, memoir and film. She also spent some of her childhood in Southeast Asia.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
Yes, I hate it. I try to read more and forget about myself.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Persistence and self-confidence in the face of apathy.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Envy. I find myself all too envious of the successful.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"Grub first, then ethics." – Bertolt Brecht

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
once wanted to be a classical musician.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Tragedy, as there is a fascination in knowing that the gods have our fate in their hands, but that we humans do everything to fulfil it, even when it kills us.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
The German word "gemütlichkeit" – or homely comforts, cosiness. It reminds me of warm evenings in front of a fire. I hate the word "incentivise". I reminds me of dog training with biscuits.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three words: heat, bridge, lyrical.

Hart Crane loved Brooklyn Bridge, it was so lyrical,
but the heat in Florida Keys was much more physical.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A chair. I can't sit cross-legged or write standing up.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Afternoon. It often coincides with siesta.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Roland Barthes, Marguerite Duras and Mary Shelley. They would have been able to talk for hours, and I could just sit back and listen.

16. How have you dealt with cultural hybridity in your past writings, and how do you think this issue will continue to be relevant in the current age and into the future?
I have always tried to tease out cultural hybridity from the state of being "cosmopolitan", in that hybridity is much more than being able to travel and live in different countries. Hybridity is also not a "happy" state, but one in which some incommensurable differences struggle for dominance within one's self. So many migrants and refugees will in future continue to have to cope with being "unhoused" or alienated, especially if they are forced to live in a place that doesn't embrace their difference or otherness. To speak of hybridity goes against ideas of racial or cultural purity and can be resistant to forces which try to "assimilate" you an identity that feels "wrong". Hybridity drives change in a way that can be enriching, not exclusionary.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?

To be
poet and
friend
and to have been both

one at least
among constellations

_____