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Articles on Australian literature

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The beach is a common setting for Australian novels, which often capture its darker side. boxer_bob/flickr

Ten great Australian beach reads set at the beach

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.
The Miles Franklin authors with their novels, clockwise from top left: Felicity Castagna, Eva Hornung, Kim Scott, Michelle de Kretser, Catherine McKinnon and Gerald Murnane. Courtesy Perpetual/ Copyright Agency/ Martin Ollman/Timothy Hillier. Eva Hornung image: Noni Martin.

Your guide to the Miles Franklin shortlist: a kaleidoscopic portrait of a diverse nation

For many years, the Miles Franklin award was a bastion of monoculture. But this year’s stories are a diverse reflection of Australia.
Behrouz Boochani photographed on Manus Island. Jason Garman/Amnesty International via AAP

Truth to power: my time translating Behrouz Boochani’s masterpiece

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.
Guy Pearce as the Chandleresque private investigator Jack Irish: in the early years of Australian crime fiction, convicts and bushrangers featured prominently. Lachlan Moore

Friday essay: from convicts to contemporary convictions – 200 years of Australian crime fiction

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.
Four of the six shortlisted books for the 2018 Stella Prize were from smaller presses, as was the winner, Alexis Wright’s Tracker. Stella Prize

Friday essay: the remarkable, prize-winning rise of our small publishers

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.
The pyjama girl mystery, as featured in Famous Detective Stories no. 6. State Library of New South Whales

A criminal record: women and Australian true crime stories

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.
Joan of Arc depicted on horseback in an illustration from a 1505 manuscript. Wikimedia Commons

Friday essay: Joan of Arc, our one true superhero

Forget Wonder Woman and Batman. The Maid of Orléans - an uneducated, teenage girl who led armies to victory - is a hero for our times.
Eugenia Falleni in 1920. An Italian-born-woman-turned-Sydney-dwelling-man, Falleni was convicted of murder in 1920. Wikimedia

Friday essay: tall ships, tall tales, and the mysteries of Eugenia Falleni

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.
Shortlisted Stella authors, clockwise from top left: Cory Taylor, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Catherine de Saint Phalle, Heather Rose, Emily Maguire and Georgia Blain. Stella Prize/The Conversation

Unflinching, luminous, and moving, the Stella shortlist will get under your skin

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.
Georgia Blain: Her work draws attention to the tiny incandescent moments that make up our lives. Scribe Publications

Goodbye Georgia Blain: a brave and true chronicler of life

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.
How many non-white writers are published in Australia each year? Is their job to remain at the exotic margins of our literary culture? Siryk Denys/shutterstock

Diversity, the Stella Count and the whiteness of Australian publishing

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?

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