Children’s fantasy has become a lucrative global industry, and duly producers are plumbing all kinds of magical authors. Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree is only the latest children’s classic destined…
Most people had little call to know of University of Sydney poetry professor Barry Spurr until a series of his emails were published by New Matilda. The messages contained racist slurs, misogynistic attitudes…
Art school, drama school, film school. Do people have a problem with these? If the arts pages of broadsheet newspapers are routinely filled with articles by celebrated artists, dramatists and film-makers…
October is the biggest month of the year for those in the literary world. This year, the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Patrick Modiano and the Man Booker Prize, to Richard Flanagan for The Narrow…
Writing in the Bulletin in January 1899, Henry Lawson complained about the difficulties of making a living as a writer. In this article he offered the emerging author a piece of unvarnished advice: [S]tudy…
This morning the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, won the 2014 Man Booker prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The novel centres on one of the key events in Australia’s war…
Is there still a Commonwealth culture? And, if so, will the “cultural flavour” of the Man Booker Prize, as two-times Booker winner Peter Carey recently described it, be lost now that Americans are eligible…
Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize with his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Giving his acceptance speech he said: In Australia the Man Booker is seen as something of a chicken…
There is a tendency in academic job applications to refer to the “prestigious x prize (or fellowship)” that a candidate has been awarded. It’s a phrase that turns out to be self-contradictory, since all…
This is not the first response to writer and radio presenter Helen Razer’s recent piece on young adult (YA) fiction in the Daily Review, the latest in a trend to either shame adult readers who enjoy the…
This is the second in my series of articles on print-on-demand and the growth of independent publishing in Australia. It explains the value of print-on-demand services for writers who want to self-publish…
To the English-speaking world at least, the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature to French author Patrick Modiano will probably have come as a surprise. Many won’t even have heard his name…
Yesterday’s decision to confer the Nobel Prize for Literature on revered French novelist Patrick Modiano has sent even the most widely-read English speaking critics scurrying to find copies of his books…
When something is wrong in the world of literature, who better to blame than the writers? Nobel Prize for Literature judge Horace Engdahl said this week, only days before the award was given to French…
Patrick Modiano is out. Who knows where. The Nobel Committee couldn’t find him before they had to make public the news that he is the 2014 Nobel laureate in literature. With absence a major presence in…
Shakespeare’s King Henry IV recently opened at the Donmar. And it has a twist. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter as the king, the production follows Lloyd’s acclaimed Julius Caesar…
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…