Put simply, typography is the art of making language visible: designing what words look like on a page or screen. Before desktop computing, typography was a specialised trade. Now, anyone with access to…
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
kieri d l h
Do you remember how people used to walk about with ghetto blasters, so you could hardly escape the high-volume throb of some visceral drumbeat? Being alive now is like having your head permanently wedged…
What time is it in Europe? Why are we still looking to the north Atlantic for cultural role models?
leoplus
Last weekend columnist and broadcaster Phillip Adams published a piece in The Australian lamenting what he called the “coca-colonial cringe”: Like you I measure my life with American movies, music and…
Hilary Mantel: unprecedented success, but not the whole story.
Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire
The Costa book awards shortlists have been announced and the one thing that dominates people’s first reactions has been the fact the fiction shortlist is made up entirely of women authors. Is the response…
Football, with its passion, drama and larger-than-life characters, has all the elements for a good literary genre.
Boris Roessler/EPA
A great football novel is like a perfectly executed bicycle-kick goal, like players such as Argentine legends Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi; they come along once in a generation. Against the accumulated…
Lessing: “intellectually uncompromising”.
Juan Martin/AAP
The writer and critic Margaret Drabble recently made an observation that I think is representative of the diverse and prolific career of the British author Doris Lessing, who died last night at 94: She…
A print designer by trade, I resisted eBooks until a single publication won me over: an edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land designed for the iPad, jointly produced in 2011 by publisher Faber and Faber…
Germaine Greer’s acquired work is enough to fill 150 filing drawers.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne announced it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive…
Letters by Australian author Elizabeth Jolley have shed light on her family history.
ABC
In 2012 Fremantle Arts Centre Press published The House of Fiction, a memoir by Susan Swingler. Last night the ABC’s Australian Story followed up with a program on Swingler and her book. Why all this interest…
New Zealand author Eleanor Catton has become the youngest ever author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize for English literature. The 28-year old author won for just her second novel, The Luminaries…
Master of the short story: Alice Munro.
Julien Behal/PA
The announcement of Alice Munro as 2013’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature marks the high point in the 82-year old writer’s long career, but also a significant recognition for the form with which…
The sudden death on Friday of the Irish Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney has focused international minds and media on the power of poetry to affect our lives. This is especially true from an environmental…
Crime fiction has become a truly global genre. Books based in Reykjavik, Oslo, or Barcelona now vie with home-grown works set in more recognisable, down-at-heel locations like Manchester or Northampton…
When it was revealed this weekend that JK Rowling was the author of a recent critically acclaimed but obscure crime novel - The Cuckoo’s Calling by one Robert Galbraith - it made perfect sense to many…
A proposed sequel to Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are has ended after his publisher sought an injunction, claiming breach of copyright.
EPA/Frank Armstrong
It seems we won’t be checking up on Max and the “Wild Things” any time soon. A campaign on crowdfunding website Kickstarter to fund a sequel to the late Maurice Sendak’s bestselling picture storybook Where…
A graphic novel has been added to the year 12 English curriculum.
Graphic novel image from www.shutterstock.com
Next year, senior students in Victoria will be able to study a graphic novel, The Complete Maus, as part of the prescribed English curriculum. As a literary and artistic form, graphic novels combine the…
Does Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby fail to meet its grandiose expectations?
AAP/Warner Bros
It’s impossible to see a film with the hype of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby without preconceptions. The build-up to this film has been overwhelming with trailers splashed across screens everywhere…
Literary critical terms and theories have been adopted by education institutions as a way to provoke thought on the relationship between humans and the environment.
Thomas Bristow
How can art and literature help us imagine a climate-changed world? In 1995, ecocritic Lawrence Buell argued that apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that environmentalism has at its…
Reading from an early age can instill healthy habits for a lifetime. “Possum Magic”, by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas.
Scholastic
The academics and the “mummy bloggers” are in furious agreement – reading picture books to children is one of the best things you can do for a child’s development. It also happens to be, in the opinion…