The Slap was a watershed publication in Tsiolkas's career. It transformed him from a writer of local notoriety into an international bestseller. For the first time, Tsiolkas was visible well beyond the insular confines of Australian literary space. It was possible to see him interviewed on the BBC in the United Kingdom, or to hear him on NPR in the United States. The novel won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was long-listed for the 2010 Booker Prize. It was also adapted for a high-profile television miniseries, which in turn became the basis of an NBC miniseries set in New York City. The success of the initial adaptation, in Australia and the United Kingdom especially, integrated the novel and its author into a broader media apparatus in which diverse forms of cultural consumption could conveniently undergird each other. As a result Tsiolkas achieved a degree of celebrity unusual for an Australian writer. One consequence of this is that he has been able to produce a discourse about his work via a proliferation of interviews and other appearances as a public intellectual. Interviews have always played an important role in framing Tsiolkas's writing. In the early stages of his career they provided a loosely autobiographical framework that foregrounded the engagements with immigrant experience, class politics and queer identity that underpin his work. By the time The Slap was published, this had changed a bit. The interviews that proliferated in its wake became the most influential and authoritative discourse about the novel and successfully linked it to a range of political issues that were by no means self-evident in the text itself: Australia's regressive immigration policy, the brutal treatment of asylum seekers, and a sense of what Ghassan Hage has called “Anglo decline.” Today, that discourse is probably the decisive context for critical appreciations of The Slap. It is an enviable position for a writer to be in. Few authors get to exert such a degree of control over the ways in which their work is being read and interpreted.

The Slap also embodies a departure from the sort of fiction Tsiolkas had hitherto been writing. For the first time one could read his work without being overwhelmed by the excesses of protagonists caught up in the violence of their own sexuality.