When Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North was published last year, one reviewer proclaimed he had just read the winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award. Flanagan’s novel has now got as…
Problem or issue-based young adult novels are not new occurrences. From John Green’s Fault in Our Stars (2012) to Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2007), books aimed at readers as young as 12, and as…
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were instituted in 2008 by Kevin Rudd. The lucrative prizes survived the recent “tough” federal budget, despite fears that they would be axed in the manner of the Queensland…
New York-based data scientist and designer Matt Daniels recently noted Shakespeare’s much touted vast vocabulary and charted how many different words Shakespeare used in comparison to contemporary hip-hop…
Should Australians be as familiar with David Williamson as with Shakespeare? Should we measure our Jane Austen with sufficient doses of Miles Franklin? Britain has recently revised the GCSE (General Certificate…
Do you think of poetry as a quaint hobby or an antiquated riddle? Think again. If you haven’t been keeping up with Australian poetry this year, you’re missing some of the country’s most exciting avant-garde…
Historical fiction is booming. The much-publicised success of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is just the tip of the iceberg for a genre that rivals…
If you’ve been involved in internet discussions about sensitive topics like sexual abuse, you may have seen the letters “TW”, short for “trigger warning”. The convention originated primarily on feminist…
It could be claimed (and I am about to) that Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains has the most compelling opening in Australian fiction: Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my…
Spies were a glamour news item in Western (and Soviet) press in the 1960s; it was the age of Kim Philby, British spymaster-cum-Soviet spy, and the endless media hunt for the “fifth man” of the Cambridge…
When you see almost complete shelves of abandoned copies of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey in charity shops, their near total worthlessness seems to suggest that an individual copy of a book…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? Welcome back to our occasional series in which our authors make the case for a work of their choosing…
Time to adjust your sets. Since October last year, this column has focused on television, but “Square Eyes” has now metamorphosed into “Portable Magic”, and will discuss books, reading, and literary culture…
This year marks 40 years since the temple of airport fiction lost its Chief Vestal. Author Jacqueline Susann maxed out her mortal coil back in 1974, on September 21, felled by cancer. She was only 56…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? See the end of this article for information on how to get involved. Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter was…
Mills & Boon, the guilty pleasure of many a reader over the decades, is shunning the Kindle in favour of launching its own app. You can now download your favourite bodice ripper and read it discreetly…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? Welcome back to our occasional series in which our authors make the case for a work of their choosing…
As the award season gets into swing, the number and quality of books published in 2013 show that this was another bumper year for work by Australian women. The winner of the 2014 Stella Prize for Australian…
In William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the conspirator Cassius bitterly describes the position of Caesar in Rome. He says: … [H]e doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men Walk…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? Welcome back to our occasional series in which our authors make the case for a work of their choosing…