After 25 years of hosting the Afternoon Program on ABC Radio Perth, Fremantle’s Gillian O’Shaughnessy has carved out a new career as a highly respected writer of short fiction.
In 2024 she won the London Independent Story Prize and the UK Welkin Mini, and was shortlisted for the UK Bridport Prize and the Bath Award for Flash Fiction.
Riding on a wave of awards and short-listings, her debut collection of flash fiction Salt City Runaway hits book stores this month.
O’Shaughnessy has lived in Freo for most of her life, and all 50 stories in the collection relate to WA, with people, places and memories bursting off the page like a turbo-charged Freud.
The prose is vivid and searing—written at white-heat.
• Gillian O’Shaughnessy is one of Australia’s best short fiction authors.
“The stories are all set over my lifetime, so from around the 1960s to now,” she says.
“The Fremantle I write about is not the postcard tourist town; it’s the gritty port with public bars, hippies and Rajneeshees and an abattoir that feeds detritus into the ocean at South Beach.
“All the stories call WA home in some way, even the one that is set in space. I do think the place you are born helps to form your character at a blood level and my characters have been shaped here.”
The vast majority of characters in Salt City Runaway are working class women or girls, perhaps a subconscious nod to O’Shaughnessy’s time as a young single mum in Fremantle and pulling pints in bars.
Most of her characters are “fictional mosaics” of people she’s met over the years, but occasionally they reflect her own life.
“Starfish is about a teenage mum who’s not quite sure what’s hit her,” she says.
“It’s probably the closest to memoir in the collection. It is true a stranger who worked at the brothel down the road did knock on my door one night and offer to buy my baby while my mum read her tarot cards.”
Flash fiction is short, but the process can be as torturous as writing a novel.
O’Shaughnessy likes to get her thoughts down quickly on paper and not second-guess herself, but the editing and re-writing can be lengthy.
If We’d Said Yes When You Rang Home to Borrow Four Hundred Dollars took her more than three years to complete.
“I wrote thousands of words and maybe 50 different stories, it wasn’t working at all,” she says.
“In the end, I asked myself where the heart was, cut it to 100 words and it was better for it. I don’t just kill my darlings, I massacre them.”
Salt City Runaway has attracted praise from high quarters including author Tim Winton—“A chorus of tiny stabs whose sly work is done before the wounds even register. The cumulative impact is startling.”
It’s clear O’Shaughnessy is fully committed to the craft and immersed in writing—this isn’t a late-career whim.
In addition to writing stories, she holds flash fiction workshops, is a former curator of Writers Weekend for Perth Festival, and is a submissions editor for US literary journal SmokeLong Quarterly.
“I do love the experimentation flash fiction allows, if a story isn’t working, I can throw it out and start again and I don’t lose so much. It’s fantastic for anyone new to creative writing,” O’Shaughnessy says.
“I love the detail and stream-of-consciousness Virginia Woolf brings to short fiction for example, the precision and intensity of Edgar Allan Poe who insisted a story should be short enough to read in a single sitting so the author maintains tight emotional control over his readers.”
O’Shaughnessy will be doing an author’s talk to mark the release of Salt City Runaway at Ode To Sirens, 25 High Street, Fremantle on Monday May 11 at 6:30pm. Tix at Humanitix—tinyurl.com/sd8s7xxx.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK