Romy Ash
Northern Rivers writer (she lives in Naarm/Melbourne but lived in Mullumbimby as a child) Romy Ash is one of the authors appearing at this year's Byron Writers Festival, making it the perfect time to catch up as she releases her long-awaited second novel, Mantle. Best known for her acclaimed debut Floundering, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Ash has spent the past decade building a rich writing practice spanning novels, essays, journalism and children's literature.
Her latest novel, Mantle, takes readers into very different territory. Set in lutruwita/Tasmania's Huon Valley, it follows a geologist named Ursula as she returns home to care for her ailing mother, only to find herself at the centre of a mysterious fungal outbreak spreading across the country. Blending science, ecology and the surreal, Mantle is a compelling story about grief, transformation, connection and what it means to live through immense change.
Ahead of her Byron Writers Festival appearance, we spoke with Romy about the long journey between novels, the inspirations behind Mantle, her writing process and how her understanding of storytelling has evolved over the past thirteen years.
More than a decade after your acclaimed debut Floundering, you've returned with Mantle. What was happening in your life and writing practice that made this the right time for a second novel?
Despite the long time between novels, I wrote Mantle quickly, in bursts, over a year. It took another year working with the publisher to edit the manuscript. Mantle felt urgent. I’d been grappling with intense feelings of climate grief/anxiety, as well as negotiating my own personal experiences of grief, after losing a loved one. I wanted to speak to both these experiences, and their entanglement. I couldn’t separate my feelings of personal loss from the gut-wrenching horror of watching, breathing in the black summer bushfires; the various and horrifying floods, the continual loss of habitat and extinction crisis. This vast, collective feeling of ecological loss felt personal. I wanted to speak to this moment that all of us are negotiating on the daily.
Readers familiar with Floundering might be surprised by Mantle. It's a very different kind of book, moving into speculative fiction and the surreal while still feeling deeply human. What drew you towards this shift in style and subject matter?
I don’t think it’s a shift in style, though it is certainly a shift in genre. I think my voice carries quite clearly across both novels: an emphasis on dialogue, a certain short clarity to the sentences, a trust in the reader. I’ve been thinking a lot about why speculative fiction speaks so directly to this moment in time, history. I don’t think realism, and gritty realism at that, which is the realm of Floundering, speaks to this moment. Life feels so absurd right now. With the introduction of generative ai, for example, perceptions of reality are being unsettled. It’s difficult to tell what’s real, or not real anymore, in the virtual realm at least. I want to know if the ‘fancy chicken’ I’m searching on the internet, is a real fancy chicken. This unsettling is quite fertile territory for a fiction writer. Mantle is not concerned with the virtual realm though. Quite the opposite. Mantle is really anchored in a connection to place, to dirt, to forests, to the feelings of swimming in the seaweed, of breathing air, life, experiencing what it feels to be a person, with a body, standing here, right now. Mantle notices the small, exquisite and ordinary experiences of being alive and on the earth, and asks the reader to notice them too.
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Mantle is deeply embedded in the landscape of lutruwita/Tasmania and the Huon Valley. What drew you to this place, and how did the landscape shape the story as it evolved?
I love southern lutruwita/Tasmania. I love its mists that sit over the landscape in the winter, how soft and blue everything can be, how cold the water is, the seaweed, it’s simply stunning. I’ve been visiting this place for around 25 years. We have a family house there, where the book is set. In fact, Ursula’s mother’s house is a quite faithfully rendered depiction of our family house, scorpions in the woodpile and all. In a lot of ways, the landscape is the story, in Mantle. As things become strange in the book, boundaries between a character and their environment begin to dissolve.
This vast, collective feeling of ecological loss felt personal. I wanted to speak to this moment that all of us are negotiating on the daily.
The novel's mysterious fungal outbreak is both fascinating and unsettling, blurring the boundaries between people and the natural world. What sparked this idea, and what kinds of research or inspiration helped shape this unsettling evolution?
I’m lucky enough to have access to the University of Melbourne library and I spent a lot of time reading about geology, seaweeds and seaweed farming, forest ecology, salmon farming, fungi. My reading was really wide ranging. I read a lot of science, but I’m in no way a scientist and I definitely just moved in and out of these books in a quite haphazard way, picking and choosing what was needed. I also spent a day with mycologist Tom May, years ago and not directly in relation to this book’s research but just as part of my long-standing obsession with fungi, and he took me both out to the forest to look at different sorts of fungi and into the herbarium in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. I also spent a little bit of time in the forest with scientist David Lindenmayer speaking about forest ecology, logging practices and the importance of old growth.
The book is structured around the four stages of twilight: Civil, Nautical, Astronomical and Night. When did that framework emerge, and what possibilities did it open up for telling the story?
I was in Tazzie writing Mantle over a couple of weeks and a friend came over at dusk. He has a little boat as many Tasmanians do and we were just chatting about twilight as it descended. I didn’t know about the different stages of twilight, but it’s quite important when you’re out there on the ocean, or so I found out. I knew, as we were chatting, that this was how I was going to structure the book. I love how the book descends into proper darkness as it moves forward.
Storytelling has never been so urgent, especially facing a lack of funding in the arts, the incursion of generative ai on artists’ copyright and the eroding of civil rights across the globe in the wake of the rise of the far right. Ursula K. LeGuin writes that, ‘We read books to find out who we are.’ It feels important right now, to keep writing and reading.
Mantle spans intimate human experiences alongside vast geological and ecological change. What did your writing process look like while working on the novel, and how did you balance the personal and the planetary throughout the drafting process?
I negotiated these two things: the personal and the planetary through Ursula, my protagonist. She’s a geologist, so she’s just incredibly knowledgeable about deep time, about the geological. The thing about putting character first is that the reader gets to consider deep time and geology through character, and Ursula, she’s funny and wry. She’s real, living and breathing, as much as a fiction character can. She’s concerned with the every day, with her new romance, with the weight of dealing with grief. The gift of character is that it’s a way into these big ideas, these big concepts.
Despite the creeping dread of the pandemic, Mantle is also full of food, cooking and shared meals. Why was the joy of eating such an important emotional anchor against the backdrop of collapse?
Environment, ecological, societal collapse is intimate and domestic, too. Amongst it all, we’ve still got to find food, cook it. Ursula’s is lucky enough to be a good cook. She is adept at making something from nothing.
One of the things that lingers after finishing Mantle is the question of whether change should always be understood as something to fear. Were there particular questions you hoped readers might sit with after turning the final page?
Absolutely. I think one of the most important paths forward is in local, networked, community care. I was also hoping readers would sit with how connected they already are with their environment. How the boundaries between things are less strong than we might think. Even the air we breathe is alive, full of spores. Even our skin is a kind of habitat. We live with our micro-biome; our guts are alive with tiny creatures. It’s one way of thinking about things!
Much has changed globally since Floundering was published in 2012. Looking back, how has your understanding of storytelling changed over the past thirteen years?
Storytelling has never been so urgent, especially facing a lack of funding in the arts, the incursion of generative ai on artists’ copyright and the eroding of civil rights across the globe in the wake of the rise of the far right. Ursula K. Le Guin writes that, ‘We read books to find out who we are.’ It feels important right now, to keep writing and reading.
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Romy Ash is part of the 2026 Byron Writers Festival program:
Writing Climate
Saturday 15 August, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Stage: Wategos Room
From literary fiction, to crime and poetry, climate and the environment permeates storytelling as an intrinsic experience of our world. Explore how three diverse writers imagine climate and our collective future. With David Heilpern.
First Times
Sunday 16 August, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Stage: Jonson St Stage
A joyous and revealing conversation with Romy Ash, Trent Dalton and Antoun Issa recalling their most memorable first times – from when they first thought they could be a writer, to landing a publishing deal, or what they'd change about their first book. With David Sly.
