Photo by Adam Smith
INTERVIEW
Festival preview: Christopher Raja Christopher Raja’s landmark memoir Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story is an examination of race, class, migration and tragedy through a deeply personal lens. Here he offers his thoughts on the gestation and process of writing the book, prior to his appearance at Byron Writers Festival 2021. Can you outline the inspiration for writing Into the Suburbs? What was the initial drive and what questions were you trying to explore? When I was eighteen years old my father’s body was found in Port Phillip Bay. The cause of death has remained a mystery. This event changed our lives. For years I was unmoored, never feeling 12 | WINTER 2021 northerly
quite right. Writing The Burning Elephant and Into The Suburbs was a way of understanding my Indian background and my family’s migration from Calcutta to Melbourne, dealing with what it was like to fit into Australia as new migrants and ultimately coming to terms with my father’s untimely death.
Can you identify some of the key influences on the book? I am a voracious reader. Some of the books I was reading and thinking about at the time of writing my memoir included Tara Westover’s Educated, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, AD Hope, Peter Steele and T S Eliot’s poetry, Annie Ernaux’s The
