Geoffrey Gates - The Phantom Surrealist

Name: Geoffrey Gates - The Phantom Surrealist
Start: 2026-09-03T18:00:00+10:00
End: 2026-09-03T18:00:00+10:00
Location: Upstairs at Gleebooks

About

6pm for 6.30pm Thursday 3 September

Geoffrey Gates in conversation with Anthony Uhlmann

Join us for drinks to celebrate Geoffrey Gates and his intriguing new novel about surrealism and the search for a missing Sydney artist.

When Christopher Tiffen discovers a painting by little-known Antipodean surrealist Robert J. Wake in the Sydney Art Gallery one summer, he is smitten by both the mysterious artist and the strange woman by his side viewing the painting. Tiffen is struggling with his research and Robert J. Wake offers him a rich seam. So begins an exciting search from Sydney to London and Wake’s early days as a surrealist painter, to France and to Barcelona and beyond.

Both mesmerising and gently comic, The Phantom Surrealist masterfully captures the ways in which surrealism shook up the art world and captured a generation of young radicals. It is both an art mystery and a love story.

‘Sassy, smart and endlessly surprising, this part artistic mystery, part playful biography, inserts a little-known Antipodean Surrealist, Robert J Wake, into the grand narratives of Modernism, art and war. Deliciously funny and remarkably informative, Gates' writing is invigorating and deft. The novel reminds us that truth in fiction, as in life, is always shifting and that Australian artists need to be recognised alongside their European counterparts, despite the tyranny of distance.’ Molly Murn

‘The Phantom Surrealist is a reconstruction of an artist's life in an intriguing and hallucinatory double-narration. With realistic sleuthing and tender evocations of an Australian abroad, Geoffrey Gates seamlessly combines past and present, pseudo-biography and history, in a prose wrought with the smoothness and clarity of a lyric poet. A witty analysis of ambition, desire, invention and rediscovery.’ Brian Castro

Geoffrey Gates is an educator, author and songwriter. After university, he taught in London and Hamburg for nine years before returning to Sydney. He holds master’s degrees in education (leadership) and arts (creative writing), as well as a Doctor of Creative Arts. Geoffrey’s short fiction and essays have appeared in such literary journals as Southerly, LINQ, and Australian Literary Studies. He was awarded a Varuna Fellowship in 2023 for his third novel The Phantom Surrealist. Geoffrey lives in Sydney with his family.

Anthony Uhlmann is the author of five academic books (on Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov, and most recently with feminist philosopher Moira Gatens on Spinoza and Literature), as well as edited collections on Gerald Murnane and Gail Jones. He is currently working on a project with Alexis Wright. He is the author of novel published by UWAP Saint Antony in His Desert (2018). He is the former director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University where he teaches literature and drama.