Lech Blaine

I wrote a short piece for Meanjin about conducting a more productive relationship with sadness and the books that I’ve been reading lately.

“The best writers make me feel both more and less alone. Without flinching, they’ll pinpoint the limits of human connection and consumption, the folly of pinning your happiness on a single person or product. This tough love is extremely frightening and ultimately liberating. No romance or promotion will save a person from intermittent loneliness. Only by tolerating that fact can you eke out a new template for existing.”

Queensland Literary Awards

It was a mind-blowing honor recently to receive the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award alongside co-winner Mindy Gill.

I was truly privileged to spin a few yarns on Conversations with Richard Fidler. We chatted about life, death, love, grief, rugby league, the foster care system in Queensland and how all of these subjects relate to my unique family.

The podcast is available to download at the ABC Website.

I was very lucky a couple of weeks ago to be awarded a Queensland Writing Fellowship. The list is filled with great names. It’s a terrific initiative by the Griffith Review, the State Government and many others who made it possible.

The short shrift is that I will have two pieces featured by the Griffith Review in 2017. The first will be published in Griffith Review 56: Millennials Strike Back. It will be an excerpt from the start of my first book Car Crash: A Memoir, which Black Inc. will release in 2018.

The second piece will be published in Griffith Review 57: Perils of Populism. It is a personal essay about the foster care system in Queensland.

Black Inc. have acquired the rights to my first book Car Crash: A Memoir. It’s about grief, trauma and technology. The speed and vanity of modern life. The banality of loss and commodification of longing. Everything going to plan, the book will be released in 2018, by which point my hair will be completely and not just semi-grey.

You can read more info at the website below:

Black Inc. Books

I was stoked to get on the shortlist for the 2016 Scribe Non-Fiction Prize. The title of my submission was iGrief: a survivor’s guide to dying. You can read an interview about my entry here or below. Read the rest of this entry »