Once typecast as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ in true crime tales, women are now more likely to be presented as complex figures in them. And many more women are writing true crime themselves.
An Italian-born-woman-turned-Sydney-dwelling-man, Eugenia Falleni was convicted of murder in 1920. Researching a novel about Falleni left this author literally, and figuratively, at sea.
White settlers and authors once saw the bush as an alien, despairing place. But writers from Tim Winton to Rachael Treasure now portray the land in complex and optimistic ways.
All six books nominated for the Stella Prize - to be announced tonight - engage the brain, and the heart. These are books that matter because they show us how to live in desperate times.
The Australian writer Georgia Blain, who died last week, wrote extraordinary portraits of family relationships, in luminous prose, with devastating insight. And when she became ill, she wrote about her cancer.
A recent attempt to broaden the Stella Count by measuring the diversity of writers reviewed proved to be a hard ask. Is the bigger problem here the whiteness of our publishing industry?
Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.
The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
All five novels explore alienation. But each is remarkably readable; with a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot.
Arab-Australian identity is not some singular, homogeneous label. Rather it exists as a spectrum and contains more complexity and diversity than the mainstream media allow.
There are many similarities between blockbusting young adult novels such as The Hunger Games series and Australian books such as Taronga – but there are also clear differences in their messages for the young.
Joan London’s The Golden Age won the Kibble Award last week, having been shortlisted – but unsuccessful – in several high-profile prizes previously. Deciding on winners is a highly subjective process.
If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.
One of the few Australian novels dealing with the first world war, David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, has been adapted for the opera stage – and the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production is a great success.
Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter opens this weekend. It’s not the first opera adaptation of Australian literature – and there are reasons to hope it’s not the last.
Emily Bitto has won the 2015 Stella Prize for her debut novel, The Strays. The prize is now in its third year and was established to redress the way in which women writers were typically overlooked for major literary prizes
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.