Kirsten Krauth

October 24, 2026 — 1:00pm

Roaming between Sydney and Hydra, Hill End and Barcelona, London and Paris, Geoffrey Gates’ third novel, The Phantom Surrealist , is a playful search for an elusive Australian artist, Robert J Wake, who grows up on the gritty streets of Surry Hills and ends up on surrealist shores with Miro and Picasso. Soon after, he disappears in Spain.

Sydney author Geoffrey Gates.

Playing detective is Christopher Tiffen, a PhD student writing an art history thesis and scrambling for clues on what happened to Wake: Did he go to prison during the Spanish Civil War? Where have his artworks gone? Is he still alive? Any PhD student in writing and literature or art history researcher will get a kick out of Gates’ blurring of genres and Tiffen’s hapless and fantasist attempts to fit his findings into academic parameters when he really wants to explode the narrative.…