Commendations
‘This work is an utterly distinctive, timely reminder of the possible ways of paying attention to our lived and remembered lives: the missives of kindness and connection that surround us as creatures whose experiences and knowledges intersect in deeply historical, familial or fictional ways. A variety of birds and kindnesses weave their way through this collection, amid war, pandemic, isolation, grief, illness and death, building towards an urgent choric invitation to hold ourselves open to beauty, wisdom, care and joy.’
- Judges’ comments, Christina Stead Prize, Shortlisted 2022
Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range … Bobis’s writing, in both her poetry and her prose fiction, is at once reassuring and uncomfortable; it quietly sears as it sings. Her music affirms the power of art and language, offering a portrait of our world which is as unflinching as it is, sincerely, a love song.
- Sydney Review of Books, 2018
‘From its core, this collection [Accidents of Composition] radiates an ambitious vision of kindness … With a voice courageous as ever, Bobis stays full of novelty and surprise in her generous, beautiful entreaty to look and listen to one another anew.’
- Cordite Poetry Review, 2018
‘Locust Girl is a transfiguring fiction that asks the reader to reflect on, and see into the hearts and lives of, those whom political systems and nations label outsiders. … There were many fine and stylistically accomplished works among this year’s entries, but the distinctiveness, sweep and visual power of this short novel set it apart. Bobis’ fabulist, indeed fabulous, narrative enables the reader to imagine what it might look, smell and feel like to be treated as less than fully human.’
- Judges’ comments, Christina Stead Prize, Winner 2016
‘Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman is a superb novel ... Written in beautifully lush, yet sharply focused language this tour de force is a tragic tale of a family destroyed during the “total war’’ ... Balancing the evocation of the fecund world being fought over is an angry rigour. The story never defects to the easy resolution but maintains its tragic intensity throughout.’
- The Australian, 2012
Perhaps only a poet could transform the themes of her second novel into something as gorgeous, disturbing, loving, and oddly hopeful as The Solemn Lantern Maker.’
- The Boston Globe, 2009
‘Bobis extracts splendour from burning dread and loss. With delicate, spare prose and silent spaces, this is definitely a thoughtful read, but also an enduring and significant one. The Solemn Lantern Maker is a sumptuously shimmering novel.’
- The Independent Weekly, 2008
‘[Banana Heart Summer] is poetry in prose, where ordinary things and events are raised to the level of the strange and unfamiliar. Magic. The style … is at the surface simple, but is in fact, complex because largely metaphorical and meanings are multi-layered … this kind of strategy may be a little too long drawn out for some readers, but certainly not for some rich sensibilities for whom this oeuvre is nothing short of dazzling.’
- The Philippine Star, 2005
‘Cultures meet, mix, and sometimes collide on the tongue — in a taste, a word, a kiss — in Merlinda Bobis’ book of short stories The Kissing … Her poetic background shines through in her short stories with piercing metaphors … Many of the images stay with the reader longer after he/she puts down the book.’
- Asianweek.com, 2001
‘… you will want to read these stories as you fall asleep and savor them one each night, to extend the pleasure of discovering that politically conscious writing can be stylistically innovative and challenging, as well as simply beautiful.’
- Pacific Reader, 2001
‘The power to amaze is what happens when a writer collapses parallel universes of the real and the fantastic, and Bobis does so convincingly.’
- Banana Café E-zine, Canada, 2001
‘To read Merlinda Bobis’ collection of short fiction is to sample as riot of tastes indivisible from that other joy of the tongue — language … It would be hard to find a writer with more love and reverence for all the pleasures the tongue is capable of enduring.’
- Ms. Magazine, New York, 2000
‘How else could one describe this rare energy squeezed most of the time in short, short pieces brimming with a kind of surreal disassociativeness but with a logic of its own, spinning with an enchantment that is a shamanlike summoning up of experience within the reader?’
- Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2000
‘Bobis is a storyteller whose work draws on the ancient Pacific talkstory tradition yet also blasts it apart with exciting new sounds and juxtapositions. She is always issuing a challenge to the reader — a haka from the pen.’
- New Fiction from the Pacific, NZ, 1999
Rita’s Lullaby is a poignant poem, a dramatic song both terrible and beautiful.’
- Judges, Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize, Winner 1995
Bobis’ poems break like fine glass, in large shards of poise and thought, before reassembling themselves with painstaking clarity … Poem after poem unveils the sophistication and sensuousness of imagery.
- (On her first poetry book, Rituals), Sunday Chronicle, 1990