My Name is Revenge, by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

It’s not that I hadn’t kept up with the inaugural Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award: it’s just that two of the three finalists were short story collections and I prefer novels.  But a chance ‘like’ on one of my tweets, led me to a novella among the finalists, and although IMHO the novella turned out to be more of a short story at only 48 pages, I wasn’t disappointed, because it’s very good indeed.  And as a bonus, there’s also a very thoughtful essay about historical denial, pragmatic politics, political radicalisation and the dilemma of truth-telling about the past without fostering resentment and vengeance.

Set in Sydney in 1980, My Name is Revenge is the story of a young man of Armenian origin.  Named as a reminder of the Armenian genocide in 1915, and intensely resentful of his school’s insistent denial of authenticated history, Vrezh idolises his older brother…