Why is a piano backgrounding a writer’s website? Why do I introduce myself over an antique Bechstein keyboard? Yes, I love pianos, piano music, and the magic great pianists conjure.
But a main aim of this website is to interest readers in my 80,000-word debut novel The Hands of Pianists. It came out in March 2021 and was in December 2022 among five novels shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
The story is narrated by a neurotic freelance journalist who played a part in his sister’s suicide. She was an elite pianist. He feels acute guilt, and all his life he has sought to relieve it.
Hands is a book about sibling love, culpability, atonement, and the physical and mental damage the pursuit of perfection can freight.
Peter Craven, whom many Australian cognoscenti believe is our best literary critic, called it an ‘absolutely compelling literary novel’ by a ‘born artist’. It was ‘virtuosic in its technique and grand in its achievement …’.
From first word to last, his review in The Weekend Australian was an unapologetic rave. He has since said publicly that Hands is the equal of W. G. Sebald’s four great prose fictions, that it’s a ‘masterpiece’.
A complex character, its narrator seeks to foist the blame for his sister’s death on to pianos themselves. He craves proof that pianos can maim and–in certain circumstances–kill. After all, he suspects that they played a major part in the violent deaths of three elite young pianists in the 1950s. Hellbent on proving his thesis, he begins to research the lives of William Kapell, Noel Mewton-Wood, and Richard Farrell, an inquiry that takes him on a meandering trek through Australian cities, the south of France, London, Prague, and a tiny village south-east of the Czech capital where an eccentric Texan makes among the world’s best fortepianos.
The great pianist Leslie Howard, whose 100 CDs of the entire Liszt piano works has earned him six Grands Prix du Disque, calls my book ‘remarkable […] full of wisdom. doubt, intense curiosity, myriad detail, and an abundance of pictorial skill’. Sebald scholar Dr Deane Blackler says it offers ‘much to reflect on, a great deal to admire, and perhaps a little to fear’. It’s an ‘intriguing narrative’, she adds.
I’m a writer, journalist, and editor who lives in Melbourne, Australia. In April 2020, my story Last Meal won the UK Fiction Factory’s short-story competition. I’ve published some dozen non-fiction books and the novella Adagio for a simple clarinet. Several have won Australian and international prizes. Three have been translated into a total of five languages.
Blackie, about the brain tumour and experimental surgery on my cat, has sold best. Advanced Australian Fare, a history of the development of restaurants and cooking between the Melbourne and Sydney Olympics (1956-2000), won the top prize at Australia’s Food Media awards in 2003. Along with Paris on a Plate, and To Die For, it has also won prizes at the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards. During 2018-2021, several of my short stories have been longlisted and shortlisted in the UK’s prestigious Bridport, Fiction Factory, Bedford, and Chipping Norton competitions.
In 2019 I was awarded a PhD in creative writing from Monash University. The doctorate’s major component was a prototype of The Hands of Pianists.
In other lives I covered a war for Agence-France Presse, reported on Iraq and covered a New Caledonian insurrection for ‘The Age’, wrote leading articles for ‘The Age’ and the ‘Herald Sun’, was a salaried feature writer on ‘The Age’ for several years, and, as a freelancer, was renowned for decades as Australia’s toughest restaurant critic.
For many years, I presented my own training programs on the power of courtesy. In the main, my clients were corporate executives, bureaucrats, and professionals. I’ve also presented many hundreds of hours of teaching and training to undergraduates and graduates.
I edit and rewrite the newsletters of GAAP Consulting — I’m the forensic accountancy’s communications consultant. In 2019 I co-edited Verge, Monash University Publishing’s annual anthology of short writing.
Lastly, I love conducting the choir of words on a page, whether they’re yours or mine.