Recently one of my Masters students, a filmmaker from the Czech Republic, told me his friends back at home were completely baffled that he was in Australia studying creative writing. You were either creative…
I recently stumbled upon a post that describes the process of literary translation as “soul-crushing.” That’s news to me, and I’ve been engaged in literary translation for the better part of four decades…
There’s a lot of attention right now on diversity in children’s books – or, more accurately, the lack of it. It’s not a new problem. White people have been talking about this issue since Nancy Larrick…
This post is the third in my series about print-on-demand and book publishing. The Small Press Network (SPN) is a not-for-profit incorporation with more than 120 small publisher members. The 3rd annual…
We know a good piece of writing when we read it. But what makes the writing “good” and how can we teach all our kids the skills that seem to come naturally to a few. Here are six principles teachers and…
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…
Pen maker Bic has been asking people around to world to submit their handwriting so it can produce what it is calling the Universal Typeface. Although the experiment is not claiming to have any scientific…
Are we being saturated with “inconsequential memoir”? That question was posed in the latest edition of The Lifted Brow (TLB), a print/online journal of new Australian and international (think US) writing…
Writing is something of a lawless place. Lawless, because there’s no clear indication that your effort will bring success; or that an answer will ever emerge from the mud; or that the most insane, most…
Games writers dream up characters, dialogue, motivations and plot much like film screenwriters. But rather than keeping an audience captive for two or three hours at a time as in cinema, gamers will play…
“I live a Cut & Paste kind of life”. So the narrator of Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall tells us. But in terms of its daring exploration of a life little understood and left in shadow, there is…
There is a section early in Richard House’s transmedia novel The Kills – published this year by Pan Macmillan and long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize – in which the protagonist, Ford, is on the run…
Let’s imagine I’m writing this article with my tomato-red Pomodoro timer gently ticking over in productive 25-minute intervals while taking a break from the novel I’m writing at a rate of 1,500 words a…
Helen Sword, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Imagine that the editor of a widely-read magazine or, say, The Conversation has heard about your academic research and invited you to contribute an article. But you only know how to produce stodgy, impersonal…