Maria Tumarkin

Maria Tumarkin is a Ukrainian, Jewish and Australian writer and cultural historian. She was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches creative writing. She is the author of four essays in which the main theme is the relationship between the past and the present: Traumascapes. The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Melbourne University Press, 2005), Courage (Melbourne University Press, 2007), Otherland: A Journey with my daughter (Random House Australia, 2011) and Axiomatic (published in Spanish by Minúscula, 2025). This latest publication from the author received the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2018, and in 2019 it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, and The New Yorker included it in its selection of the best books of the year. In 2020 Tumarkin won the Windham Campbell Award for Nonfiction.