Published: 7 May 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
"They'd call a case and I'd get up and the magistrate would look at me and say, 'are you self-represented?' and I'd have to say, 'no, my client is the respectable looking person behind me'," Presser says. "After a while they got to know me so it wasn't such an issue."
Presser is now on a hiatus from law, having recently published his debut novel, The Book Of Dirt, which won the NSW Premier's Literary Prize earlier this week (the awards took place a week after our lunch).
Presser has always wanted to be a writer, long before the punk and the law. "When Yidcore first got a record deal, I also had interest for writing from an agent in England, but I thought, I can always write when I'm older, but there's only so long you can be a punk rocker sleeping on concrete floors around the world."
But he hadn't envisaged that his first book would be inspired by his own family – or that it would take eight years of research and travel to complete.
A fictionalised account of his grandparents' survival of the Holocaust, The Book of Dirt grew from a "crazy" article about Presser's grandfather, Jakub Rand, which appeared in the local Jewish press – a decade after his death.
FULL STORY Lunch with Bram Presser: 'There's an essential truth in fiction' (SMH)
Photo: Bram Presser dining at Blencowes Milk Bar, Balaclava, Nelbourne (Chris Hopkins)
