FEATURE
Festival preview: Kaya Wilson Ahead of his appearance at Byron Writers Festival 2021, author Kaya Wilson discusses his acclaimed memoir of gender transition and identity, As Beautiful as Any Other: A Memoir of My Body, and how his day job as a tsunami scientist crosses over with his writing. What was the initial impetus to write the book? What were the key questions or ideas you were compelled to explore in the embryonic stage? The embryonic stage was much more of a diarised account of transition and my life through 2016 onwards. It was raw and unconstructed. I basically wrote a 1,000-word essay every week on 08 | WINTER 2021 northerly
whatever was happening at the time. I didn’t set out to write a book as such, I just came home from the doctor after disclosing that I was questioning my gender and the first essay burnt out of me. It was a good process, I learnt a lot about what got me angry or sad or joyful and how I wanted to use my voice and what that voice would be. Looking back on those essays,
I was able to be playful and try different things out. The process of learning about myself at that time included discarding a type of self-consciousness and that new freedom really shows up in the essays. The book became longer thematic essays based on that original writing and although that writing served a purpose, there’s a reason you’re not reading them!
