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HSU-MING TEO was born in Malaysia in 1970 and emigrated with her parents to Castle Hill, Sydney, in 1977. She began studying medicine, but changed to arts in her second year of university. After completing a Ph.D. at the University of Sydney in 1998, she taught postcolonial studies at the University of Southern Denmark. She is now a research fellow at the Department of Modem History at Macquarie University. A cultural historian and novelist, she works in the area of twentieth-century European history, British imperial culture, travel and tourism, and popular literature. She is the co-editor of Cultural History in Australia (UNSW Press 2003). In 1999, she won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her first novel Love and Vertigo, which was also short-listed for the inaugural Tasmania Pacific Region Literary Prize and the Dobbie Award for women's fiction. It has been translated into German, Italian, Chinese, and Thai. Her second novel, Behind the Moon, was published in 2005 and short-listed for one of the 2006 NSW Premier's Literary Awards. She was a member of the NSW Premier's Literature and History committee in 2004, one of the judges of the 2007 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, and was on the advisory council of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is currently serving as one of the editorial board members of the Journal of Australian Studies.
Alison Broinowski (AB): A connecting thread of fear has been detected in your fiction. The June 2009 special issue of Antipodes featured several essays that discussed your work. Would you agree with that?
Teo Hsu-Ming (THM): It's hard to reduce any novel down to one thing, but fear is definitely a significant part of Love and Vertigo, and especially in Behind the Moon. The section of the Antipodes article that quoted views about [fear in] Australian society, much ofthat is generated by the tabloids, by current affairs television. AU of that comes through in the novel but ultimately it goes beyond Australian society. It's about the human condition, the fear of being alone, the fear of loneliness, and not being able to connect. Now this I think is the great modernist fear. We have for instance E. M. Forster's great epigraph in Howard's End - "only connect" - and the whole...