PRESENTED BY THE WRITING AND SOCIETY RESEARCH CENTRE & GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING

Please join us for a celebration and discussion of What Kept You?, the powerful debut novel by Raaza Jamshed.

Published by Giramondo in July 2025, this novel ‘offers an energetic new voice in Australian fiction: vivid in expression and bold in vision (Gail Jones). Set across the fault lines of memory, migration, and myth, What Kept You? follows the story of Jahan, a Pakistani woman raised on her grandmother’s cautionary tales. Shaped by demons of folklore, colonial rupture, and the silence of intergenerational trauma, these stories taught Jahan to be wary of the world. But her grandmother’s life – marked by quiet acts of defiance – hinted at another truth. Jahan rebels against the constraints of girlhood in Lahore, and migrates to Australia, where she tries to remake a life with her Arab husband, Ali. There, as she reckons with the unruliness of her body after a miscarriage, an unravelling marriage, and bushfires that threaten their home and horses, Jahan is forced to confront the violence that haunts her, against women, animals, and in nature.

As Jamshed explains in her author note, ‘I found myself returning to a line from Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching: “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.” I wanted a girl in my story to get away. I wanted her to survive, even if that survival looked like wreckage.’

Featuring readings and discussion with the author, What Kept You? will be launched by A/Prof Anne Jamison.

Copies of What Kept You? will be available for purchase on the night for signing, with light refreshments available to guests.

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This event is jointly supported by the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney Creative, Western Sydney University and Giramondo Publishing.

Date: Thursday 31 July

Time: 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Venue: PHIVE, Parramatta Library, 5 Parramatta Square, Parramatta, Civic Gallery (Level 3) (just outside Parramatta train station)

RSVP: This event is free, but RSVP is essential for catering purposes. All are welcome.

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RAAZA JAMSHED

Raaza Jamshed holds a doctorate in Creative Arts from Western Sydney University where she is an adjunct fellow. She is the Interviews and Global Spotlights editor at Guernica magazine. Her writing explores gendered subjectivities, environmental crisis, migration, and the politics of language, and has appeared in Guernica, Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books, and Australian Book Review. Her short story ‘Miracle Windows’ was a prize winner in the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House, Hedgebrook, and the Banff Centre. Her debut novel, What Kept You?, was released by Giramondo in July 2025 in Australia and New Zealand.

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ASSOC. PROF. ANNE JAMISON

Anne Jamison is an Associate Professor in English at Western Sydney University, as well as Deputy Director of the University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. Her core research focus is on Irish women’s writing from the long nineteenth century. She has published research on a broad range of Irish writers of the period and is also author of E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross: Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration (2016). Anne is presently researching a book-length project on Irish women’s fairy tale and fantasy writing for children in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To support this work, she was granted a Keough-Naughton Irish Studies Award at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 2023 and was appointed Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast for 2024-2027.

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