Emily Bitto for ‘Reasons to Leave’
Emily Bitto is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She has a Masters in Literary Studies and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne. Her debut novel, The Strays, won the 2015 Stella Prize and was published internationally. Her second novel, Wild Abandon, won the Margaret and Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. Emily was awarded a Prague City of Literature residency in 2024, and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2025. She has been teaching for over a decade, and is currently a tutor at the Faber Writing Academy.
Reasons to Leave
Reasons to Leave follows a small group of Czechoslovakian migrants who flee their homeland following the Soviet invasion of 1968, which quashed what came to be known as the Prague Spring. The novel is made up of two main parts: the first, set in 1969, spans the first months of the characters’ lives in Australia, living in a migrant hostel in Broadmeadows and working in the factories of the surrounding suburbs; the second is set three decades later, after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, at the funeral of one of the group. Very different fates have befallen them since they migrated. Now, the death of their friend forces those who remain to reflect on what they have gained, and what they may have lost, in coming to ‘the West.’