About Alex Dunkin

Hi there. I’m a writer and publisher based in Adelaide, South Australia. I got started in my writing career as a journalist writing predominantly for LGBTIQA+ street magazines. It was in these roles that I was able to further connect with the local rainbow community, and thus began my passion for elevating underrepresented and vulnerable voices. I took pride in spending time with interview sources who have never worked with someone from the media before and reaching a point where they could trust me with their story. Connecting with such stories led me down the path of interviewing and transcribing the oral histories of queer elders for the non-fiction book Peering Through: Sharing decades of queer experiences.

While working as a journalist I continued to study language, linguistics, and literature with a focus on exploring the difficulties of translating niche contemporary Italian genres. It was also in this period of the early 2010s that I started writing novels, resulting in the release of my first novel Coming Out Catholic in 2015. I was raised in a religious family in a small town in the south-east of South Australia and spent some time in a private Catholic high school. When I embraced more of my queerness, I shut off my faith, not able to see a world where I would be accepted within religious communities. Curiosity got the better of me and I ventured back into religious texts, which ultimately inspired me to write the YA novel on a character who finds a way to balance his own love of Jesus with his burgeoning homosexuality. Today I am still no longer a person of faith, but I’ve learned many aspects of community and acceptance from the religious people in my life.

The novel was picked up for publication as I was wrapping up my First Class Honours and seeking the next writing opportunities. I had fallen in love with writing full-length books after my experience with Coming Out Catholic and I put that passion into my second book Homebody, which was released a year later alongside an art exhibition featuring artwork by Dylan Pimm that was inspired by the book. The early framework and ideas for the micro-publishing label Buon-Cattivi Press spawned from this incredible experience.

It was during my PhD work that I wrote my third fiction novel Fair Day. The novel formed the artefact component of my thesis, in which I demonstrated the limitations inherent to direct translations of the Italian grotesque satirical genre of cannibale and produced the means for recreating the genre in an Australian setting. The ubiquity of Australia Day, my own whiteness, and privilege within patriarchy provided ample material upon which to glare the harsh gaze of the cannibale lens.

After a few years in the PhD, publishing, and journalism systems, I found myself wanting to do more and find a means to clear a path for other people to have a chance at sharing their voices and stories as well. The plans for Buon-Cattivi Press evolved from here. I used the royalties from the sales of my three novels as the initial source of funding to publish the label’s first two books in 2018: Peering Through, and It’s Your Fucking Turn to Cook. Each year I now use the publisher royalties to produce the next publication, which allows the label to publish for 1-2 books a year.

As a publisher and editor, I have had the absolute joy of spending time with emerging and unique voices and writers. Without the constant commercial pressures and stricter deadlines of larger publishing labels, I can spend the time required for each writer to take raw ideas and polish them into insightful, at times confronting, and distinctive texts. Since the establishment of Buon-Cattivi Press I have released Michael Noble’s historical fiction Nicholas Culpeper and the Mystery of the Philosopher’s Stone, Gabrielle Everall’s Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys which was included in the ABR’s 2020 Books of the Year, Dr Gertrude Glossip’s Queen of the Walk and Gert by Sea, Doris Pushpam’s The Story of She, and the anthology Green by UniSA’s creative writing and research group.

Embracing these incredible projects has also taken me into the classroom to teach creative and professional writing at university. I’m excited to see what the next projects will be and to see these writers continue to develop their craft. In the meantime, I continue my role as a volunteer performing arts reviewer for Glam Adelaide after celebrating by 10th year writing for them in mid-2023. I still write my own pieces with a few novel-length projects in the works.

I hope you enjoy reading my work as much as I enjoyed creating it. Feel free to get in touch.

- Alex