Leah De Forest was born in Geelong, Australia, and lives in Boston. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Bodega Magazine (nominated for a Pushcart Prize), LEON Literary Review, Monash University’s Verge 2020, Overland, and Kill Your Darlings, among others. Her novel was long-listed for the 2015 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, highly commended in the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and shortlisted in the Varuna Publisher Fellowship Program. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches fiction at the Harvard Summer School.
“But if we don’t try, if we don’t look privilege squarely in the eye, then privilege is all we will see.” In part II of this essay on subject position in fiction, Leah De Forest looks at Z.Z. Packer’s “Brownies” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
“The focus here isn’t on point of view, but on positioning: a way of thinking about who a character is as well as who they are in relation to the others in the world of the story.” In part I of this essay on subject position in fiction, Leah De Forest explores Allan Gurganus’s “Blessed Assurance.”
