Megan Brown – författare

Life writing often explores the profound impact of border crossings, both physical and metaphorical. Writers navigate personal and cultural boundaries, reflecting on identity, belonging, and the transformative power of crossing thresholds. These narratives unveil the complexities of migration, immigration, or internal journeys, offering intimate perspectives on adapting to new environments or confronting internal conflicts. Un/Bound is a collection of essays about such narratives, with an emphasis on mobility and border metaphors, the ethical dimensions of cross-border storytelling, and questions of access, translation, and circulation. Scholarly interest in borders, mobility, and related topics has greatly intensified in the context of public health emergencies and recent conflicts in international relations. The chapters in this book contribute to this dialogue by exploring internal and external, and physical and abstract borders and divisions.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, translation studies and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Life writing often explores the profound impact of border crossings, both physical and metaphorical. Writers navigate personal and cultural boundaries, reflecting on identity, belonging, and the transformative power of crossing thresholds. These narratives unveil the complexities of migration, immigration, or internal journeys, offering intimate perspectives on adapting to new environments or confronting internal conflicts. Un/Bound is a collection of essays about such narratives, with an emphasis on mobility and border metaphors, the ethical dimensions of cross-border storytelling, and questions of access, translation, and circulation. Scholarly interest in borders, mobility, and related topics has greatly intensified in the context of public health emergencies and recent conflicts in international relations. The chapters in this book contribute to this dialogue by exploring internal and external, and physical and abstract borders and divisions.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, translation studies and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

When Mary Fortune arrived in Melbourne with her infant son in 1855, she was determined to reinvent herself. The Victorian goldfields were just the place.

After a time selling sly grog and a bigamous marriage to a policeman, Mary became a pioneering journalist and author. The Detective's Album was the first book of detective stories to be published in Australia and the first by a woman to be published anywhere in the world. Her work appeared in magazines and newspapers for over forty years – but none of her readers knew who she was. She wrote using pseudonyms, often adopting the voice of a male narrator to write about 'unladylike' subjects.

When Mary died in 1911, her identity was nearly lost. In Outrageous Fortunes, Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex retrieve Fortune's astonishing career and discover an equally absorbing story in her illegitimate son, George. While Mary was writing crime, George was committing it, with convictions for theft and bank robbery. In their intertwined stories, crime fiction meets true crime, and Melbourne's literary bohemia consorts with the criminal underworld.

'Mary Fortune's bold fictions electrified colonial Australia. But her own story, pieced together by two tenacious literary detectives, was best of all.' —Gideon Haigh

'A fine introduction to the author and her work.' —Garry Disher

'Outrageous Fortunes is a delight: beautifully written and carefully researched, it is an engrossing, illuminating and ultimately deeply moving portrait of an extraordinary woman and her ne'er-do-well son. The pioneering crime writer Mary Helena Fortune finally receives the biography she deserves, and no mystery reader should be without it.' —John Connolly