Kindling Does for Firewood

Kindling Does for Firewood is a novel by Australian writer Richard King, published by Allen & Unwin Academic (ISBN 978-1-86448-168-6). The novel, King's debut, won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award in 1995. A review in Publishers Weekly states that the "clearly talented" author used experimental/stream-of-consciousness monologues.[1] The reviewer states that King "...aims for a flip tone in this debut chronicle of slackers in Melbourne, Australia". The review states that the romance between a female postsecondary student, Margaret and a male bookstore clerk, William, is "doomed from the start". Margaret is from a regular middle-class family, but Peter lives with unemployed roommates who only consume beer and drugs. The unemployed roommates are somewhat like the Lost Boys from the Peter Pan stories; King acknowledges the influence of the Peter Pan stories in his work.[2]

Paul Dawson, commenting on the Australian Vogel Awards, stated that the $20,000 award "...can be seen as a barometer of cultural preoccupations, mapping shifts at the edges of literary culture: here is where the direction of young writing appears to be moving, or at least where judges and publishers want it to move." Dawson states that "[i]t could be argued that Richard King's lightweight Kindling Does for Firewood was a safe option [for the Vogel Award givers] in the wake of the [Helen] Demidenko scandal in 1995."[3] The Helen Demidenko scandal involved her Vogel Award in 1993 for The Hand That Signed the Paper, "contributing to public debates about the responsibility of writing history".[4] The Hand that Signed the Paper is about a Ukrainian family trying to survive a decade of Stalinist purges and state-imposed poverty and famine. When the media discovered Helen Dale's identity and legal name, this promoted much debate on the nature of identity, ethnicity, and authenticity in Australian literature.[5][6]