I was born in Melbourne, Australia during the Cold War and I knew I wanted to be a writer when my Year Eight English teacher held up a piece of my creative writing and declared it “filth”. Though I tried desperately to escape suburbia I soon realised that you can take the boy out of the suburbs but you can’t necessarily take the suburbs out of the boy. My novels, fictions and scripts are an attempt to explore the crevices and dark spaces of the Australian suburban landscape, and in doing so to hopefully scrawl a huge ugly handle-bar moustache over the dirty-blonde, blue-eyed Aryan iconography of this Great Southern Land. I have been accused of being a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, a pornographer, a blasphemer and an upstart declasse poseur. I have also been accused of political correctness, of being an unreconstructed socialist, of being a crypto-Protestant Christian (which really pissed off my Mum), and of being a nice man to sit next to at a dinner party. I live in fear that there is an “other” Christos Tsiolkas and one day I’ll go through a Philip K. Dicksian wormhall and confront myself as a complete stranger.

“This is not my beautiful house
This is not my beautfiul wife.”

Christos Tsiolkas writes novels, plays and scripts. His first novel Loaded was turned into the film Head On by Ana Kokkinos. His third novel Dead Europe won The Age Fiction Book of the Year prize in 2006 and also the Melbourne Prize for that year. But like any parent, Christos looked most fondly on his least favoured child, his second novel The Jesus Man. In 1999 Christos was asked to partcipate with three other writers (Andrew Bovell, Patrcia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves) and composer, Irini Vela, on the theatrical collaboration, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? The production won the Australian Writers Guild top prize for that year but more importantly was the beginning of a long professional relationship with the above artists and the Melbourne Workers Theatre. Other plays include Viewing Blue Poles and Elektra AD, and Non Parlo di Salo, written with Spiro Economopoulos, about the Italian filmmaker, poet and activist, Pier Paolo Pasolini.