The mind field
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My research is largely in the field of poetry and poetics, so not surprisingly poetry frequently makes its way into The Mind Field. I’m particularly interested in times that poetry hits not the literary…
You could forgive a reader for thinking that journalists were writing about 16-year-old Lorde who topped the US charts last week with her song Royals, not a 28-year-old writer who already has an award-winning…
The world of letters is in shock to learn that Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s best-loved poet, died on Friday at age 74. “The death has taken place of Seamus Heaney,” publisher Faber and Faber said on behalf…
While Kevin Rudd was in Darwin proclaiming the need for “a national imagination” to grasp the economic potential of northern Australia, his Arts Minister, Tony Burke, was in Brisbane to celebrate the nation’s…
But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road, / really exaggerated in their beauty - Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Questions of Travel’ After a week of rampant sexism in the media…
Well this is curious. Women outnumbered men on the Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist by 4:1, and now the judges - for the first time in the Award’s 57-year history - have turned out a shortlist that…
On an autumn day in 1914 Laurence Binyon sat on a cliff in North Cornwall, somewhere between Pentire Point and the Rump. It was less than seven weeks after the outbreak of war, but British casualties were…
The Stella Prize, which comes with a whopping $50,000 purse, is Australia’s newest literary prize celebrating Australian women authors. Australia’s other “gendered” prizes for literature include The Kibble…
I admit it: I was wrong. I was satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason would win the 2012 Bad Sex in Fiction Awards for his ikebana-cum-gymnastic efforts in his…
Poets and writers get twice the sex of regular mortals, according to a study led by Dr David Nettle of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B…