Peter Polites is a novelist from Western Sydney. He has written two acclaimed novels, Down the Hume and The Pillars, which won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural NSW Literary Award. He also won the 2020 Woollahra Digital Literary Award for Fiction. In 2021 he was the ACT Writer in Residence at UNSW Canberra.
‘Polites’ book is a triumphant reclamation, written in prose clean as polished stones but consciously bearing something of the occasional awkwardness and inadvertent poetry of his mother’s bilingualism. God may forget about the poor, but Polites evidently does not. He has rescued his mother’s modest story and made it into a contemporary epic of homecoming.’ * The Saturday Paper * ‘It’s a tender, funny, full-bodied portrait – and utterly transporting.’ * The Guardian *