A new play tells the story of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s time on the Greek island of Hydra, which ultimately led to the novel My Brother Jack - but not without sacrifices.
Scientists can be under-appreciated in Australian culture. Here are eight great fictional scientists to get you thinking about labs, test tubes and bold experiments.
While tourism campaigns often portray the beach as an idyllic, isolated haven, many of our beach stories depict it as a darker, more complex place. Here are ten worth reading.
Behrouz Boochani wrote his memoir of incarceration on Manus Island one text message at a time. Translating this work of ‘horrific surrealism’ from Farsi to English was a profoundly philosophical experience.
Australia’s rich tradition of crime fiction is little known – early tales told of bushrangers and convicts, one hero was a mining engineer turned amateur detective – but it reveals a range of national myths and fantasies.
A new room will open at the NSW State LIbrary today, furnished with objects from Donald and Myfanwy Horne’s study. Their daughter, Julia, reflects here on a writing partnership and the room that fostered it.
As major publishers chase bestselling books, small ones are leading the way in publishing Australian literary fiction. And of late, they have been sweeping our major literary awards.
Once typecast as ‘bad’ or ‘good’ in true crime tales, women are now more likely to be presented as complex figures in them. And many more women are writing true crime themselves.
An Italian-born-woman-turned-Sydney-dwelling-man, Eugenia Falleni was convicted of murder in 1920. Researching a novel about Falleni left this author literally, and figuratively, at sea.
White settlers and authors once saw the bush as an alien, despairing place. But writers from Tim Winton to Rachael Treasure now portray the land in complex and optimistic ways.
All six books nominated for the Stella Prize - to be announced tonight - engage the brain, and the heart. These are books that matter because they show us how to live in desperate times.
The Australian writer Georgia Blain, who died last week, wrote extraordinary portraits of family relationships, in luminous prose, with devastating insight. And when she became ill, she wrote about her cancer.
A recent attempt to broaden the Stella Count by measuring the diversity of writers reviewed proved to be a hard ask. Is the bigger problem here the whiteness of our publishing industry?