First Chapters Q&A with Ender Baskan

Ender Baskan is the author of the novel A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man published by Vre Books.  His work revolves around the condition of the contemporary psychosphere.  Poetics, revolution and the Australian Dream are some of his prime obsessions.  He is currently writing postcards.  Ender is the recipient of the 2014/15 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Prose.  

Ender will be reading from A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man at First Chapters on Friday 7 February.  


1. Brunswick Bound has asked you to read a piece from your published work.  Tell us
what we can expect from the piece you have chosen?

The piece is from my novel A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man. It is fiction but its not a novel in the classic sense. What starts off as a road novel turns into a meditation on the question of how can we be in Australia. The narrative is like a rocket on the space shuttle, I need just enough of it to get through the stratosphere, and from there I want to break down the distance between you and me.

2. How would you describe your writing?

I am trying to unpack and illustrate and illuminate the things and ideas that obsess me. There is a feeling of desperation.

3. What was the first book that you read (or had read to you) that left an impression
on you?

I was 15 or 16 when I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I had read quite a few Dickens novels by that time, they had an impact on me but the going East into Russian literature just completely obliterated me. Raskolnikov haunted me for years, still haunts me.

4. Do you believe that books should answer life’s big questions?

They can provide fuel and concepts and inspiration. Ultimately a person must grapple with these questions themselves.

5. Do you have any writing quirks?

I dislike the semi-colon and other, similar forms of fascist punctuation.

6. What is your favourite word or phrase?

Revolution.

7. What have you found most surprising or interesting about publishing a book?

Receiving emails and having conversations with people I don't know about an autobiographical novel. They know a lot more about me than I do about them.

I'm also one-third of Vre Books, the publisher of my book. I have been heavily involved in the entire publishing process. Printing, editing, buying an isbn and a barcode, distribution, promotion, invoicing etc.. In short I am not alienated from my labour, I am involved on every level.

8. What is the question that you hope never to be asked in an author Q&A?

None.

9. What question do you hope you will be asked and why?

Why must you write, now, that the world as we know it is ending?

10. Which author or book do you think should be better known or more widely read?

Out of political urgency I would like everyone to read The Uprising and Breathing by Italian Marxist media theorist Franco Bifo Berardi. He is a ruthless and entertaining critic of the diabolical moment we live in. He cuts through. These two books are companion pieces, most definitely not light summer reading, but a kind of shock therapy to get us thinking deeply about how to combat and unshackle ourselves from the pervasive ideology of the times we live in.

Find out more about the First Chapters Event Series on the Brunswick Bound website.