My name's Benjamin Solah; I'm a horror writer and Marxist revolutionary from Sydney, Australia. I work as an
administration assistant full-time but my main passions are writing class conscious and anti-capitalist horror fiction and also,
campaigning against the horrors of capitalism – war, racism and poverty.
I got involved in writing after being an avid reader. I began reading young adult horror books whilst in Primary School such as R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series and used this to try my hand at writing my own. Even at that young age, I had a dream of being a published novelist.
But it wasn't until Year 11, the start of my final two years of High School, that I got back into writing (and even reading.) My English teacher encouraged us to read to build our vocabulary and after reading a few novels by Stephen King, I was hooked by the writing bug once again. I began to write plain old horror fiction, with gore being the major element, but as I was getting into writing, another change was happening within myself: I was beginning to get political ideas.
I can attribute some of this to my Legal Studies teacher and Modern History teacher as we went through units on human rights law and Soviet Russia. But also, I come from a working class family that have been pro-Labor for a long time. I guess they didn't expect me to turn out so radical. The thing that threw me into action, instead just screaming into the screen or blogging, was Merlin Luck's protest on Big Brother against the mandatory detention of refugees. My first instinct was to find as much information as possible and after reading Asylum I was so outraged by what was going on in the world that I could not do nothing.
I attended World Refugee Day in 2004 and from then on, I've been politically active in building campaigns including the campaigns against the mandatory detention of refugees, the War in Iraq and the whole 'War on Terror,' WorkChoices and VSU. It's through campaigning that I've come to call myself a socialist. I don't think it's enough to oppose one or two things that you think is fucked with the world. I see it all connected into the system of capitalism and all of the attacks come from the need for governments to maintain this system.
As in socialist, I mean I'm a Trotskyist from the Cliff tradition. I don't see Cuba, China and Venezuela as Socialist countries, and think that the Russian revolution was defeated by a counterrevolution by Stalin. I think we need a working class revolution to overthrow capitalism and to create a totally democratic system where workers can create a new society based on human need and not corporate greed. This desire for a new world inspires me to write class conscious fiction that really envokes the biggest horror, capitalism.
Benjamin Solah is a proud member of the Australian Horror Writer's Association.
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Contact
E-mail: benjamin [AT] benjaminsolah [DOT] com
MSN messenger: bsolah@hotmail.com
Yahoo Messenger: disturbedwriter_86
Add me to your social network
MySpace: http://myspace.com/benjaminsolah
Bebo: http://disturbed-comrade.bebo.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=652421214
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