Panthers and the Museum of Fire is a novella about walking, memory and writing. The narrator walks from Glebe to a central Sydney cafe to return a manuscript by a recently-dead writer. While she walks, the reader enters the narrator's entire world: life with family and neighbours, narrow misses with cars, her singular friendships, dinner conversations and work. We learn of her adolescent desire for maturity and acceptance through a brush with religion, her anorexia, the exercise of that power when she was powerless in every other aspect of her life.

 

'It is not too much of a stretch to compare Jen Craig's work with the otherwise incomparable WG Sebald.' - Debra Adelaide

 

'...the reader is made aware at once that Craig is a writer of great skill.' - Kerryn Goldsworthy

 

Jen Craig's short stories have appeared in various Australian literary magazines. She collaborated with composers of the chamber opera, A Dictionary of Maladies, in Switzerland in 2005.