Mark Henshaw – October 29 2017

Mark is an award-winning writer who has lived in Paris on an Australia Council fellowship and studied at the University of Heidelberg on a scholarship. He has been a tour guide and curator of international prints at the National Gallery of Australia. Having run away at age 14 from the violence of his father, Mark went on to study medicine, but finding illness too confronting, then studied music with the aim of becoming a composer. Despite being felled by rheumatoid arthritis, Mark later enrolled in a double honours degree in English and German, which led him to Germany and the decision to become a writer rather than an academic. Under the pseudonym JM Calder, Mark has co-written two crime novels with his friend and fellow Canberra writer John Clanchy, If God Sleeps and And Hope to Die.

The Snow Kimono
Text Publishing, 2014; ISBN 9781922182340
There are times in your life when something happens after which you’re never the same. It may be something direct or indirect, or something someone says to you. But whatever it is, there is no going back. And inevitably, when it happens, it happens suddenly, without warning. Set in Paris and Japan, this is the story of retired Inspector of Police Auguste Jovert, former Professor of Law Tadashi Omura, and his one-time friend the writer Katsuo Ikeda. All three men have lied to themselves, and to each other, and these lies are about to catch up with them. An intricate psychological thriller that is also an unforgettable meditation on love and loss, on memory and its deceptions, and the ties that bind us to others.

Out of the Line of Fire
Penguin, 1988; ISBN 9781925095463
To an Australian writer visiting Heidelberg, the brilliant young philosophy student Wolfi is a compelling character. From the start, the details of Wolfi’s life are curious – from his inquisitorial father and passionate mother to the grandmother who pays for his sexual initiation with a prostitute and to his connections with the outlandish rogue Karl. As we are lured by Wolfi’s obsession into the mysterious and erotic maze of this novel, we find nothing is as it appears. What in fact is fact and what in fiction is fiction?