The “MONA effect” has set Tasmania’s arts scene on fire – will Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker win do the same for its literature?
EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA
Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Man Booker Prize has put Tasmanian writing in the spotlight – and the announcement of new state literary prizes has helped too. So what is distinctive about Tasmanian literature?
The six finalists of the Stella Prize, announced yesterday, include three authors who have been shortlisted based on their first major works of fiction. That’s definitely something to celebrate.
The new waterfront in Australian literature: Parramatta.
Lina Hayes/Flickr
Despite boasting a population of 2 million people – more than South Australia, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and the ACT combined – Western Sydney has, to date, had little impact on the literary pulse…
Bush balladeers celebrate the district, its identities and their adventures.
Oceana/Flickr
When Brian the farmer finished his poem the crowd went wild. Small wonder he earned the People’s Choice Award on the night. We were at a so-called poetry “slam” at a country hall in a place so tiny it…
Books do not necessarily bring us all together, tell ‘our’ story, unite us.
AAP/Joe Castro
On Monday night, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced with a tie in the fiction category between A World of Other People by Steven Carroll and the Booker Prize and Queensland Literary Award…
Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest has won the inaugural Voss Literary Prize.
Tambako The Jaguar/Flickr
The Voss Literary Prize, for which I was a judge, was awarded for the first time this week. The winner, Fiona McFarlane for her novel The Night Guest, was chosen from a shortlist that included Hannah Kent…
What happens when the enablers of our future vanish?
Ben Leto
The lost child isn’t a specifically Australian figure, but it’s certainly had an important history in this country. For more than a century, we have watched and read narratives about girls and boys who’ve…
Nick Cater’s shortlisted work, The Lucky Culture, is one of several non-fiction options.
AAP /Dean Lewins
This year’s cultural debates about the constitution of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards judging panels are now giving way to consideration of the shortlists and their relative worth. Even as these…
The Robert Farquharson case raised questions about male violence that go unanswered.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
Helen Garner isn’t usually thought of as a crime writer, but some of her best-known prose has been on law-breaking. She won the prestigious Walkley Award for her 1993 Time Magazine article on the murder…
We don’t seem to be able to shake our cultural status anxiety.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
Writing in the Bulletin in January 1899, Henry Lawson complained about the difficulties of making a living as a writer. In this article he offered the emerging author a piece of unvarnished advice: [S]tudy…
Richard Flanagan joins other Australian winners and contenders for the Booker.
EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA
This morning the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, won the 2014 Man Booker prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The novel centres on one of the key events in Australia’s war…
Winner of the chicken raffle.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize with his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Giving his acceptance speech he said: In Australia the Man Booker is seen as something of a chicken…
Three of the five Miles Franklin award nominees for 2013 were women - but female authors are still underrepresented in the review pages.
AAP Image/Honner Media, Hamilton Churton
So, the Stella Count is in for 2013. These are annual statistics collected by the Stella Prize that measure the number of books by women that get reviewed in major publications and the number of books…
What renders this work a classic, a book that every Australian should read?
Palo
“We knew it in words, yet kept it secret,” says Frances, the young sister-in-law of Patrick Logan, the eponymous – and notoriously cruel – commandant of Moreton Bay penal colony in Jessica Anderson’s ground-breaking…
Can literary works play a productive part in the process of reconciliation?
butupa
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology…
All serious writers should take their own work, and the efforts of others, seriously.
photosteve101
There should be no hard and fast rules concerning book reviewing. That’s because reviewing constitutes a worthy genre in its own right, one that should not be limited by guidelines or mandates. Criticism…
David Malouf’s Imaginary Life plays out in the hillsides of the Black Sea. What’s so Australian about that?
Hans Juul Hansen
… further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands…
Let’s not underestimate the intellectual goodwill that sustains our literary culture.
Antoine Robiez
Book reviewers and the editors of periodicals that commission them are used to sour assessments of their worth, but Professor John Dale’s article on The Conversation yesterday is in a class of its own…
A Million Windows asks a good deal of its readers, requiring us to piece together elements through patterns of connections rather than through a clear narrative line.
runmonty
Gerald Murnane’s most recent novel, A Million Windows, might be read as a meditation on the relation between sound and silence. At the heart of the novel, though only revealed at the end, is a secret that…
What is lost and gained when book reviewers remain faceless?
Scott Beale / Laughing Squid, laughingsquid.com
The Saturday Paper publishes anonymous book reviews and, occasionally, reviews by identified critics. That anonymity was a much-discussed feature when the paper launched in March, and the debate continues…