Program: Maria Takolander

Maria Takolander is an Australian poet with Finnish heritage. Takolander lives in Geelong, Victoria, where she works as an Associate Professor in Literary Studies and Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University. She has published a book on South American magical realism, called Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007); three books of poetry: Narcissism (2005), Ghostly Subjects (2009), and The End of the World (2014); and a book of short fiction, The Double (2013); a novel, Transit, is forthcoming.

Takolander’s poetry often dwells on the self, the body, and history: her grandparents and her parents survived World War II, when Soviet Russia invaded Karelia in eastern Finland; that dark history keeps cropping up in her poems. She also has an abiding interest in intertextuality: all of her work—poems, short stories, essays—is interwoven with references to other texts, and infused with the light of different imaginative modes, most prominently magical realism and the gothic. In this program Maria Takolander reworks the literary, cultural and historical pasts, building on them and bringing them alive in her poetry.