Maxine Beneba Clarke

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer and slam poet of Afro-Caribbean descent. Her critically acclaimed first short fiction collection, Foreign Soil, won the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, the ABIA for Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2015, and the 2015 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction. Her recently published memoir, The Hate Race (for which she received the Hazel Rowley fellowship), is about growing up black in white, middle-class Australia. She is also the author of the poetry collections   Carrying The World (2016), Nothing Here Needs Fixing (2013), and Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (2009).