My Australian education taught me that SHAKESPEARE IS UNIVERSAL. As I’ve gotten older I’ve grown to see how sexist and often racist the text can be, and I’ve found myself wanting to adapt and shift it so that I can see myself in it.

Who here has ever read The Rainbow Fish? I had fond memories of it as a kid. I have recently come to learn that rainbow fish actually uses they/them pronouns. Which people/fish don’t really understand.

In the original poem, the narrator addresses a woman who has been slow to respond to his romantic advances, in an effort to get her to have sex with him. We don’t hear anything from her perspective. My poem seeks to rectify this by imagining her response.

The assumption of heterosexuality is prominent within the literary psyche. What happens to a story when we are open to the possibilities of the character being queer?

Now, when I read Jane Eyre, it’s impossible for me to ignore just how racist and fixed in its worldview it is—while she was very well educated for the time, Charlotte Brontë would have been not much more worldly than her fictional heroine.

I wanted to show how a lauded novel like this novel could be changed to suit modern times. For me there’s nothing more current than diversity, which is why my Nic is Indian and a girl entering the wilds of a private boarding school in Sydney’s North shore.

I wanted to respond or critique the idea that the male writer is free to depict women or whomever he chooses with ridiculous stereotypes. I wanted the women from his stories to speak their minds and to destabilise the privilege and platforms white cis male writers have been afforded for too long.

Aladdin was a story where Arabs are portrayed as thieves and liars, women have little or no agency and Jasmine in particular is always dressed in a sexualised way – I wanted to subvert that narrative.