I’ve lived overseas for 12 years, the vast majority of my adult life. I visit Australia every year (global pandemics permitting) but I’m no longer allowed to vote. I consider Melbourne my home town and brag about it relentlessly but my accent has become hopelessly mangled. And though my nationality is the first line of my standard bio – Mikaella is an Australian writer based in Berlin – it’s rarely apparent in my actual writing.
My fiction already has a strange, hybrid quality; I write novels with my wife, Onjuli Datta, our two voices twining around one another with more than a decade’s worth of practice to create a shared language I step into as easily as my own. Onjuli is British, as is the heroine of our first novel, but, if we were taking turns, I skipped mine.
