My grief for Georgia Blain was also about losing her work. So her ‘new’ stories are precious

Georgia Blain’s posthumously published We All Lived in Bondi Then has an elegiac quality, often meditating on the isolating aftermath of loss. Photograph: Scribe Publications

A short time after Georgia Blain died I discovered that I’d somehow deleted her voice messages from my phone. It was another devastating loss: I mourned those random, ordinary messages about nothing – about running late for coffee, how to cook burghul – because I couldn’t bear never to hear her voice again.

Sometimes, when I miss her now, I listen to our conversation about her work recorded for a writers festival, or I find one of her many radio interviews still available online. I love to hear her speaking voice: clear, unsentimental, truthful, funny. Self-deprecating, yet completely unashamed.