Anthony Macris

Anthony Macris (born 29 June 1962) is an Australian novelist, critic and academic. He has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Age Book of the Year, and been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. His creative work has been supported by grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has been a regular contributor of book reviews, feature articles and essays to the national media, principally in the area of international literary fiction. He has been called a post-grunge lit writer, a reference to an Australian literary genre from the 2000s which emerged following the 1990s grunge lit genre.

Capital novels The main concerns of the Capital novels are "the increasing penetration of market forces into everyday life" (Sydney Review of Books), and the effect of "the last several decades of capitalist ‘progress’ ... [on] ‘the life-worlds of ordinary people" (The Conversation).

In Capital, Volume One, Macris employs techniques from the French Nouveau Roman to produce a vital yet impersonal tracking of the movement of dead commodities in a London Underground train station. In this track of the novel, Macris presents a dystopia of the marketisation of quotidian, globalised life, alluding to Marx's study of the commodity form and to the journey of Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. These impersonal chapters focused on the London Underground are contrasted with memoir-like fragments from a failed bildungsroman, in which assemblages of neoliberal capitalism—combining with pop musical and film culture, with the petroleum industry, with the higher education and restaurant sectors—are presented as both subject-forming and subject-de-forming. Working alongside the clearly critical intent of the novel is a joyful, disorienting experimentation with subject, time and place, producing something like a sublime rhythmic composition that, rather than falling into the negative, critical gravity of the novel's content, suggests ways out of this neoliberal dystopia.

Awards 1998: Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist: listed for Capital, Volume One 1998: Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book: South-East Asian Section (shortlist): Capital, Volume One 2003: Sussex-Samuel Award, Australasian Languages and Literature Association: "Claude Simon and the Emergence of the Generative mise en abyme" 2011: Age Book of the Year (shortlist): When Horse Became Saw 2012: Prime Minister's Literary Awards: non-fiction (shortlist): When Horse Became Saw