The Journal

248 Spring 2022

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Overland literary journal > Articles by: Martin Kovan

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Martin Kovan

Martin Kovan is an Australian writer of non-fiction, fiction and poetry. He also works in academic ethics and philosophy. In Australia his writing has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, Colloquy, Westerly, Island Magazine, Peril Magazine, Southerly and Mascara Literary Review, and overseas in the USA, France, the Czech Republic, India, Hong Kong, UK and Thailand. His recent novel K. the Interpreter was shortlisted for the 2020 Dorothy Hewett Award.

Articles by Martin Kovan:

3 March 202129 March 2021

Adjudicating aberrance: Assange and the Australian state

Martin Kovan

The coalition government, Labor opposition, and much of the Australian intellectual, cultural and media commentariat has in recent years consistently betrayed, not merely an important Australian citizen, but the very ethos we like to imagine is uniquely our own: the capacity to adjudicate moral conflict with decency and good sense, an attention to facts, and an egalitarian concern with a ‘fair go’ for all.

3 April 20205 May 2020

Thinking about Jägerstätter: the making of moral meaning

Martin Kovan

Is Jägerstätter’s sacrifice best understood in religious terms, or can it be conceived within a secular moral framework?

Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017

Subsistence years

Martin Kovan

the all too public ‘lyrical age’: a decade of ironised nostalgia. (Cf. Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere, Kerouac, Hesse. Films of G van Sant, G Armstrong, B Ellis. East of Eden, the origin myth. All ‘those indies.’ The music, the music – too profuse to list. Retro R & B on the car stereo: the late 60s, the 70s, all over again.) Life is always elsewhere, especially when it most palpably isn’t. The emergence from crepuscular puberty into the high self-romance that follows.

24 November 201623 January 2017

Žižek during Trump: rhetoric and philosophical impotence

Martin Kovan

Wikileaks was quick to post to Facebook a video of Žižek endorsing Trump as his candidate of choice. A post-election interview has him repeating, somewhat chastened in the rainy streets of Manhattan, that Trump is unconscionable but preferable to Clinton. What do his claims amount to now that that possibility is fact? What might before the election have passed as a hope for a radical displacement of what Žižek calls ‘status quo’ Democratic exceptionalism, now promises something more radical than even Žižek had in mind.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014

In Memoriam Hashem Shaabani

Martin Kovan

We searched you in the hollows And we searched you in the fen We took you down for mercy

7 August 201312 August 2013

On self-immolation, asylum seekers and the manufacture of concern

Martin Kovan

Some months ago, Overland published an essay in which (as a scholar of Buddhist non-violent resistance) I detailed the now 120 self-immolations of Tibetan monks, nuns and lay-people, a number not including the case of an Englishman, a young man whom I knew and who was also an ordained monk in the same Tibetan Buddhist tradition as the majority of his Tibetan cohorts.

Published in Overland Issue 210 Autumn 2013

The year of great burning

Martin Kovan

In Tibet, 2012 was the year of great burning. By 10 December, the International Day for Human Rights, ninety-five ethnic Tibetans in the formerly Tibetan now Chinese territories of Qinghai and Sichuan, and in the Chinese-occupied Tibetan Autonomous Region, had set themselves aflame. Of these, seventy-eight are known to have died.