Soft Side of Red Afternoon Tea with Christine Shamista

"I hung onto every word in this collection. It was beautiful, visceral, powerful. An exciting new voice celebrating who we are and where we belong.” - Melina Marchetta, author of the Australian classic, Looking for Alibrandi and The Place on Dalhousie.

'Beautiful and smart and sometimes blood-drawingly sharp” - Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident and Love Objects.

Christine Shamista’s collection of poetry - Soft Side of Red – is based on her experiences living in Sri Lanka, England and Australia as part of the Tamil diaspora. These poems explore her journey of leaving her ancestral home in the time of the Sri Lankan civil war, then living in and between different cultures in England and Australia, where she now resides.

They recount experiences of casual and systemic racism,– and her discovering delight and pride in race and identity despite these experiences.

Christine Shamista’s writing has been published in a number of anthologies, including: Resilience (2022); Sweatshop WS anthologies Racism: Stories on fear, hate & bigotry (2021), Sweatshop Women Volume 1 (2019) and Volume 2 (2020); and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013). Her poetry has also been published in a number of journals and online platforms such as Red Room Poetry and Mascara Literary Review. Soft Side of Red is her first collection of poetry.

Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and the author of Song of the Sun God (2022), Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) and The Barrier (2017). In 2023 she was awarded the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens. Song of the Sun God was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and short-listed for Sri Lanka's Fairway National Literary Award. Her short stories have been published in the Sweatshop anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2). Shankari is the deputy chair of Writing NSW.