About Roslyn
Roslyn McFarland has an MA in Creative Writing from UTS, Sydney, and several of her poems, short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in various online and print publications.
While working for many years as a secondary teacher, she wrote and edited a series of successful HSC English Course books. Having spent a great deal of her time in France and as a lover of the arts, she was naturally drawn to the colourful life of the Australian WWII artist, Stella Bowen. The result is FOREIGN ATTACHMENTS, her second novel, which was published late in 2024.
Her debut novel, ALL THE LIVES WE'VE LIVED, was also published by Ginninderra Press in 2019, while her novella, THE PRIVACY OF ART was a Bronze Medal Winner in 2016 Global eBook Awards.
Roslyn lives in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, on the traditional lands of the Darug and Gandangara people.
Recent novel — Roslyn McFarland
In this beautifully constructed Russian doll of a novel, two Australian women leave their homeland in search of a room of their own in which to forge their art. Stella Bowen studies painting in London where she meets, among other literati, wild Ezra Pound and the bearlike, charming Ford Madox Ford with whom she lives in the countryside, has a child and enters the glittering life of Paris in the 1920s, where she struggles to survive and paint and where the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Jean Rhys dance in and out of her life.
A century later, Neve leaves Australia for life in Paris with the suave Antoine to write her novel on Bowen’s life. Each woman is captured by love and confronted with betrayal and obstacles in the pursuit of her art.
By skilfully building a novel within a novel, Roslyn McFarland’s Foreign Attachments delivers a deeply entertaining and life-filled portrait of the lives of creative women in a novel as richly rendered as one of Bowen’s exquisite paintings.
— Jo Gardiner
All the Lives We've Lived — Roslyn McFarland
Living alone in the Blue Mountains, baby-boomer Kate Ward is estranged from her adult son. Where did it all go wrong?
She decides to return to Salt Pan Creek, the place of her childhood in post-war Sydney suburbia. It’s here that she must come to terms with a history that’s far greater than her own personal past.
While ALL THE LIVES WE'VE LIVED takes us back to relive the fifties, sixties and seventies, it’s Kate’s willingness to confront the truth of her teenage relationship with Gary, an indigenous boy, that reflects Australia’s need to face its collective colonial past.
Blending fictional and historical characters and events, this deeply moving novel of interconnected stories is ultimately about storytelling itself: about our need to tell them; about the ones we remember; the ones we value; and the ones we distort because the truth may be too hard to bear.
‘This is an exceptional novel — a work of the imagination edged with compelling reality. The lives go on in the rhythms of the prose and vibrate in the memory. The story is a brave one and this is a book I will come back to again.’ — Robert Adamson, poet, publisher and inaugural CAL Chair of Poetry at University of Technology, Sydney
‘Each story is a jewel set perfectly into the whole where the interior worlds of the characters are rendered in engaging and powerful detail.’ — Jo Gardiner author of The Concerto Inn
Roslyn reads from All the Lives We've Lived
Links
FOREIGN ATTACHMENTS is available in print at Ginninderra Press and online book retailers. Also available as an e-book. Some personally signed copies are available from Roslyn. Please see contact details below.
ALL THE LIVES WE'VE LIVED is available at Ginninderra Press and online book retailers. Also available as an e-book. Some personally signed copies are available from Roslyn. Please see contact details below.
Writing Western Sydney: The Readings | Roslyn McFarland reads from ALL THE LIVES WE'VE LIVED video
Contact
Email: info@roslynmcfarland.com