NewSouth Publishing is proud to announce the acquisition of world rights to Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation, the debut literary nonfiction work by acclaimed writer and cultural critic Neha Kale.
Foreign Return asks: How do you inhabit spaces that were never built for you? Can you find home somewhere you were never supposed to belong? These questions form the heart of a deeply personal and intellectually rich exploration of migration, the fallacies of belonging, and the meaning of home.
As a child, Neha Kale migrated from India to the outer reaches of suburban Perth, an ancestral home, a colonial house in Goa, lingering in her memory. It sparked a life of relocation and movement around the world. Mixing personal narrative with art and cultural criticism, Foreign Return explores the myth of the suburbs, colonial legacies, what it means to migrate to a stolen land, and changing ways we will need to conceive of homes and their ownership. In doing so she considers the works of artists who have helped her reimagine ideas of home, including Tracey Emin, Dayanita Singh, Albert Namatjira, Hoda Afshar, Nan Goldin, Amrita Sher-Gil and others.
‘When I migrated from India to Australia as a young girl, I internalised the idea that there were only two paths laid out for me if I was to “belong” to a culture in which people like me were simultaneously celebrated as part of a national project and framed as an invasive species that threatened a finite set of resources. During a time of rising anti-migrant sentiment, I wanted to think beyond the West’s reductive narratives and search for other ideas of what home could mean.’
NewSouth Publisher Harriet McInerney said ‘In the midst of a housing crisis, this mesmerising literary exploration of home offers a generous and generative exploration of how we make our homes and the power of art to help us reimagine these intimate spaces.’
Ideal for readers of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, this resonant work invites us to rethink the places we inhabit and the stories we tell about them. It is a call to build empathetic, imaginative bridges between ourselves and others, and to reclaim the power to define home on our own terms.
About the author
NEHA KALE is a widely published writer whose work spans criticism, journalism and essay. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, SBS, The Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, ABC, Griffith Review and The Saturday Paper, among many others. She is the former editor of VAULT magazine and editor-at-large of Art Guide Australia. Kale has been recognised by a Faber Scholarship for Creative Nonfiction, a Create NSW literature grant and residencies at Varuna and Bundanon. She has spoken at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne Writers Festival, judged major literary and arts awards and was part of a team nominated for a Walkley Foundation media prize.
Foreign Return will be published by NewSouth Publishing in August 2026.
