What I've Learnt - Elliot Perlman

WHAT I'VE LEARNT

Passionate, witty, vulnerable, intelligent, and honest – critics describing the work of bestselling author Elliot Perlman.

A born storyteller I recall many school lunchtimes and weekends - Ell writing, creating scripts, novels, and songs. As one of the only other writers I knew, I was inspired.

It was while practicing law in 1994 that he won The Age short story competition for ‘The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming’, which became the titular story of his bestselling short story collection. In it explores complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers; the corporate betrayals, the lost opportunities, the hopes, the fears, and the vagaries of desire.

It would jettison him into the global literary world and see him go on to write a further 4 bestselling novels, spend nine years as a New York-based writer and swap out his law career for his passion to become a fully-fledged successful published author.

His debut novel, “Three Dollars” is a deft portrait of a man attempting to retain his humanity, his family, and his sense of humor in grim and pitiless times of downsizing, outsourcing, and privatizing. The big-screen adaptation – co-written by Perlman director by Robert Connolly, and starring David Wenham and Frances O’Connor – was awarded the 2005 Australian Film Industry Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In

SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY (2003)

Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work school teacher takes matters into his own hands, in a story of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism.

THE STREET SWEEPER

Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz.

As these two men try to survive in early 21st-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have predicted.

Elliot is a wonderful mix of down to earth authentic Australian and fierce intellectual. As a teenager and an avid Carlton fan, he wrote an ode to his favorite Carlton player called “ I want to be like Stephen Silvagni” something we all ended up singing at recess, yet he’d create mixed tapes of the latest greatest bands and give you an extensive list, if not the actual books of his latest top ten books you must read. And well I did!

His recent best selling novel “Maybe The Horse Will Talk” is an exemplification of this incisive, comical, timely, and engaging skill -

Elliot has always had a talent for capturing the moment and tapping into the zeitgeist.

Now optioned by Paramount Television his latest novel, THE HORSE WILL TALK is palpable and relatable.

“I thought, let’s tell a story of adults in this incredibly precarious world of work where so many … people are subject to what gets called ‘work-family conflict’ – that situation where the demands of the world of work are incompatible with the demands of family and social bonds,” Perlman says.

“You can’t properly satisfy both. And that’s the case whether you’re experiencing over-work in a competitive workplace or insufficient work and insufficient income in the ever-growing, e

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Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/what-ive-learnt/id153556330
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3TQjCspxcrSi4yw2YugxBk
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