The Mundiad / Justin Clemens
Shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2014
Erudite, witty and deeply weird, The Mundiad is a blistering parody of the contemporary world from one of Australia’s most unique literary imaginations.
Modelled on classical epics such as Virgil's Aeneid and Pope's Dunciad, The Mundiad is a mock epic poem celebrating the conception and birth of little Mundia, her heroic escape from her parents, medical staff and hospital, and journey into the real world. A world of deranged superstars, climate-change deniers, rogue states, multimedia extravaganzas, political bullshit, creepy talkback demagogues, financial crises, child soldiers, happy idiots, genetic engineering, death camps, pornographers and more.
Justin Clemens is the author of Villain, The Mundiad, the novella Black River and Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy. He writes extensively on contemporary Australian art and poetry, as well as on contemporary European philosophy. He has two daughters, of whom he is inordinately proud, and teaches at the University of Melbourne.
“A fabulously irreverent rant … Scholarly without being ponderous, beautifully elegiac about popular culture and witty to boot”
