Veggie Mama Book Club #7: The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke

I first started reading Maxine’s work in The Saturday Paper years ago and was always struck by her words and sense of story. Here’s someone who could really smack you in the face with both. Her prize-winning memoir The Hate Race has been on my to-read list since it was published in 2016. I had a feeling it would be confronting, funny, devastating, and would provide a narrative about growing up in Australia that I’d be incredibly unfamiliar with, making it completely required reading.

The Hate Race won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural NSW Award 2017, and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s LIterary Award for Non-Fiction in 2017, the ABIA Biography Book of the year 2017, the Indie Award for Non-Fiction 2017, and the Stella Prize 2017.

Maxine is absolutely brilliant on Twitter, Instagram, everywhere in Australian media, and has, you know, just a casual background in human rights and anti-discrimination law. She’ll be doing some very diverse stuff at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival this year too, including a poetry performance and children’s workshop. Keeeeeeeeen.

About The Hate Race

Suburban Australia. Sweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke’s life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street. Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing.

From one of Australia’s most exciting writers, and the author of the multi-award-winning Foreign Soil, comes The Hate Race: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.

You can find more here. Bring a cup of tea and a couple of sangas, Maxine has a hefty background!

Where to Find The Hate Race

Brunswick Bound, Readings in-store and online, Hachette, your local bookshop, and all the usual online spots.

About the Veggie Mama Book Club

This is super-chill, read what you want, as much or as little as you want, participate-however-you-want-kind of book club. Maybe challenge yourself a little because that is a good thing, but let this not be a burden.

We’ll pick a book per month and discuss it both on the blog and in the Facebook group (and for locals, in real life, over a beverage and platter of some type).

You can share at any time anywhere with the hashtag #vmbookclub and you can tag me @veggie_mama. I am also open to suggestions at any time, and I look forward to us maybe getting out of our literary comfort zones and always learning something when we do, even if we don’t like the book itself. Or the author. Or Tuesdays. Or broccoli.

Find previous picks here:

• February: M Train, Patti Smith / discussion
• March: Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh / discussion
• April: Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf / discussion
• May: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy / discussion
• June: Lost for Words, by Edward St Aubyn / discussion
• July: A Cook’s Tour, by Anthony Bourdain