The mind field
Displaying 11 - 20 of 20 articles
While the guests at the 2012 Man Booker Prize award ceremony dinner in London tucked-in to roasted leg of lamb, potato mille feuille, confit turnip and jugs of Madeira jus, I and book bloggers around the…
Some of the names thrown around were Haruki Murakami from Japan - author of Norwegian Wood and, most recently, 1Q84, a novel about a woman who slips into an alternate reality; Margaret Atwood or better…
Campbell Newman might have hoped the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards were dead, buried and cremated: the allocated prize pool of $230,000 shared across 14 categories had been scratched from his budget…
“Style,” Gore Vidal defined, “is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” And that is precisely how Vidal – daring, bawdy, an intellectual swashbuckler – lived his life, which…
In 1914 Apollinaire encountered a beautiful young aviator – he called her Lou – and launched one of poetry’s legendary, if doomed, love affairs. Lou fuelled and participated in his erotic fantasy life…
At first glance the phrase ‘best-selling poetry book’ looks oxymoronic. Anyone with a vague sense of book publishing is acquainted with the orthodoxy that poetry doesn’t sell: readers don’t want to read…
“Poetry makes nothing happen”. It’s the most often quoted line of W.H. Auden’s famous elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” - it could even be the most quoted line of his career. People draw on it when they…
If ever there was a doubt that bookmakers (as in bet-takers, not publishers) are the clear-eyed prophets of the future, it should be put to bed now. Online bookie Tom Waterhouse called Anna Funder as the…
Just because it’s the debate we had to have, didn’t mean it wasn’t going to hurt. The fracas began in 2011 when the Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, unveiled its all-male…
Most writers will admit they’d never get anything done without the pressure of a good deadline. And for unpublished writers there’s no bigger deadline on the Australian publishing calendar than that of…