Steve Toltz – June 7 2020

Steve is an award-winning novelist. He is a graduate of the University of Newcastle, Australia. Prior to his literary career, Steve lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. His first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, has repeatedly been compared favourably to John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. In 2004, halfway through writing it, Steve became paralysed due to a cervical spinal haemorrhage while walking down a street in Paris. He spent several months hospitalised, both in Paris and in Australia. “In addition to providing narrative inspiration, his stretch of acute disability cemented in Toltz the belief that this thing we call our ‘character’ is pretty well unshakable. ‘We’re really set with what we’ve got by a certain age…. I remember sitting on the banks of the Seine writing A Fraction of the Whole, and then a month later I’m sitting in a wheelchair at the hospital with the same notebook, continuing to write, and even at the time it struck me as absurd that I was just still going about my business.’” (Pip Cummings interview, The Sydney Morning Herald) Despite being told he may never walk again, Steve has made a full recovery.

A Fraction of the Whole
Penguin, 2008; ISBN 9780143009528
Meet the Deans. The Father is Martin Dean. He taught his son always to make up his mind, and then change it. An impossible, brilliant, restless man, he just wanted the world to listen to him – and the trouble started when the world did. The Uncle is Terry Dean. As a boy, Terry was the local sporting hero. As a man, he became Australia’s favourite criminal, making up for injustice on the field with his own version of justice off it. The Son is Jasper Dean. Now that his father is dead, Jasper can try making some sense of his outrageous schemes to make the world a better place. Haunted by his own mysteriously missing mother and a strange recurring vision, Jasper has one abiding question: Is he doomed to become the lunatic who raised him, or a different kind of lunatic entirely? From the New South Wales bush to bohemian Paris, from sports fields to strip clubs, from the jungles of Thailand to a leaky boat in the Pacific, Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole follows the Deans on their freewheeling, scathingly funny and finally deeply moving quest to leave their mark on the world.

Quicksand
Sceptre, 2015; ISBN 9781473606067
Intensely moving, darkly funny and hugely entertaining, Quicksand focuses on the multifaceted dynamics between the protagonists, lifelong friends Aldo, an ex-con in a wheelchair and Liam, a struggling writer and failing cop. Aldo has an uncanny knack for disaster and as his luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on Aldo’s exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo’s mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship. As well as being a compulsively funny work, Quicksand also offers its readers a profound exploration of fate, suffering and resilience; a gruelling yet illuminating depiction of physical disability; and a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.