Alex Landragin

Crossings arrives with a choice. Alex Landragin's first novel is presented as three found manuscripts, The Education of a Monster, City of Ghosts and Tales of the Albatross, and its preface invites the reader either to go straight through or to follow the Baroness sequence, hopping between the three by page numbers printed at the close of every chapter. Taken the second way, a letter from Charles Baudelaire to an illiterate girl, a Paris romance set as German forces arrive in 1940, and the memoir of a woman who does not age fold into one story running a hundred and fifty years and seven bodies. Pan Macmillan published it in Australia in 2019 and St. Martin's Press in America a year later; it reached the Voss Literary Award shortlist and the Indie Book Award longlist for debut fiction. Landragin is French, Armenian and Australian, born in France into a family of champagne makers and brought to western Victoria as a child. He has worked as a librarian, in Indigenous community work and as a Lonely Planet guidebook author, and holds an MA in creative writing from Melbourne.