Is Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy the great Australian novel? Beejay Silcox, chair of the Stella Prize judging panel that selected it as this year’s winner, thinks it might be.
L’expertise universitaire, l’exigence journalistique
Articles sur Australian fiction
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With all the talk of “truth-telling” in Australia, some of it worthwhile and some clichéd, Kim Scott’s writing provides an invaluable entry point to a meaningful dialogue.
The debut novels of two forceful, intelligent journalists are bold, brash stories of powerful women at the top of their game. One details a horrific sexual crime, the other ugliness in the art world.
Lives that matter: new novels by Trish Bolton and Graeme Nash defy the stereotypes of older women in fiction.
A novel about first-wave feminists cleverly critiques the movement’s privilege. The first fiction from Nakkiah Lui’s imprint highlights uncomfortable truths. And a debut about teen girls is ‘too naive’.
The novel Appreciation is a literary page-turner with no shortage of dramatic flair.
Bigambul and Wakka Wakka author Melanie Saward’s Burn is structured around three fires. It bears witness to the role institutions play in exacerbating trauma associated with colonialism.
Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.
In Women and Children, Tony Birch is unequivocal about domestic violence: when everyone knows someone is in trouble, there is a collective duty to do something about it.
The narrative of Temperance is built around two disappearances, which traumatically affect the lives of a woman and her children.
The narrator of Charlotte Wood’s new novel has shed her life to live with nuns. The world intrudes in the form of COVID, a mouse plague and recovered bones, delivered by someone from her past.
It’s remarkable to see these three innovative, bravely experimental and often unsettling Australian story collections – by a debut author and two prize-winners – published so closely together.
The Modern, a debut novel centred on an Australian researcher at New York’s MoMA, muses on modern art and relationships – riffing off MoMA artists like Grace Hartigan and Nan Goldin.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s fourth novel cracks open the toxic power dynamics between a privileged huddle of ‘Blondes’ and the culturally diverse girls they seek to marginalise.
Tara Calaby’s novel peeps into the interior lives of women in a 19th-century asylum and uses her historical imagination to generate new knowledge.
Three debut Australian novels explore diverse territory: the recognisable real world of parental estrangement, and a dystopian near-future where it never stops raining.
André Dao has kept the legacy of his grandparents alive in Anam, a brilliant novel of immense scope that became a full quest for the truth of his family history, which spans the two Vietnam Wars.
Resistance, like Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, uses its main character – a therapist, Nina – as a vehicle for others’ stories.
Novels aren’t responsible for the climate crisis and probably won’t solve it, but there is plenty they can do. They can make us feel for lives unlike our own; modelling careful thinking and analysis.
Kath O'Connor’s debut novel, Inheritance, follows two women – an IVF hopeful and her grandmother – who carry the BRCA1 gene and contract ovarian cancer. It’s very close to being memoir.
Les contributeurs les plus fréquents
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Associate Professor, Creative Writing, University of Wollongong
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Writer, author, journalist, Associate Lecturer in English & Writing, University of Tasmania
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PhD Candidate, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
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Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
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Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
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Associate Professor, Griffith University
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Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
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Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University
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Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Tasmania
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John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Researcher, Australian Catholic University
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PhD candidate, Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
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Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer in French Studies, The University of Melbourne
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Professor of History, School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle
