Every October, some unsuspecting writer gets a phone call from the secretary of the Nobel Prize committee. And overnight, an averagely respected author is turned into a global literary celebrity. Quite…
Seamus Heaney’s final poem has been published just over a year after his death. Finished ten days before he died aged 74 in August 2013, the poem is a mediation on a painting of a canal by the French artist…
As we’ve marked the centenary of the first world war in 2014, the great poets of that conflict – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke – have brought the literature of conflict into focus. But…
In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that anyone else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force. So wrote Mohandas Karamchand…
A novel written in an invented “shadow tongue” to give the feel of Early Middle English has a place on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths book prize for innovative fiction. But the odd style isn’t why Paul…
Authors don’t write books, they write manuscripts. Publishing is the process of getting an author’s manuscript into the hands of a reader, by materialising it – giving it form, as a book. This may be printed…
Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, often referred to as the “last Mitford sister”, has passed away. But Debo, as she was known to friends and family, was an institution in her own right. Under…
Our Guilty Pleasures series featured literature academics writing about their guilty summer reads. Claire McGowan rounds it off by dismissing the term entirely. Between seeing author talks and comedy and…
So, the Stella Count is in for 2013. These are annual statistics collected by the Stella Prize that measure the number of books by women that get reviewed in major publications and the number of books…
As a bookseller, I frequently find myself in conversations with customers about “appropriateness” when choosing literature for young readers – and these often conflict with research I have encountered…
“We knew it in words, yet kept it secret,” says Frances, the young sister-in-law of Patrick Logan, the eponymous – and notoriously cruel – commandant of Moreton Bay penal colony in Jessica Anderson’s ground-breaking…
I recently found myself at a bookshop at Sydney’s domestic airport with less than ten minutes until my plane boarded. Scanning around frantically for something to read, my eyes were immediately drawn to…
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. So said Elmore Leonard, prolific author of westerns, short stories and crime novels. He died last…
Booker Prize-winner Eleanor Catton announced last week she would use her NZ$15,000 winnings from the New Zealand Post best fiction and people’s choice prizes to set up a new grant for writers, dedicated…
The books we’ll be buying for Christmas are making themselves known, their places in the various longlists and shortlists fiercely discussed in the papers. Every named writer wins a sticker on their book…
Dictators dislike detective novels. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany outlawed crime fiction in 1941. The crime novel, according to the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture, weakened the health of the…
In recent years there has been a significant shift in understandings of transgender identity. So often caught up with ideas about sexuality, the liberalisation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians has…
Learn this labyrinth, Holly … so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. So Jacko, Holly Sykes’s “freaky little brother”, says as he hands his sister a “diabolical”, nine-circled…
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, last month parents scrabbled to make costumes of popular characters from children’s books. They were preparing for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual…
My early teenage summers were spent either on trips to India with my sister to see our friends and family, or at home in the UK. In either place they were full of long days spent reading on a veranda or…