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.
The latest round of NAPLAN results show Australia’s school systems are not good at reducing the influence of a student’s background on their academic achievement.
Being able to sound out letters in words doesn’t mean you can understand them. There is no clear evidence that a new phonics screening test for children in Year 1 will help improve reading levels.
Not every student will publish work or win prizes and very few will be able to earn a living putting pen to paper, but the teaching of creative writing is about more than that.
Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.
Writers, over the last decade, have been waxing lyrical about the rise of the present tense in English fiction. But this morning I read something entirely new – for me, at least. I read a manuscript written…
In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.
Lionel Shriver’s controversial speech about cultural appropriation has made headlines around the world. But the debate need not be a binary one – novelists might approach characters from other cultures as ‘thoughtful tourists’.
With a pilot that was deemed too complex and cerebral, ‘Star Trek’ looked dead in the water. Fifty years later, we look back at the show’s rocky beginnings.
Do you know how to tailor and target your work to gain the attention of people beyond your own peers – including funding assessors, politicians and the media? Learn how at this one-day masterclass.
The writing process is different whether your instrument is a fountain pen, a crayon, a typewriter or a computer. What fingerprints does the technology leave on the product?
Seasons, stars, settler colonialism: the nations of the south – Australia, Argentina and South Africa – have much in common. And the 2003 Nobel laureate for literature, JM Coetzee, is helping reframe Australian writing within this southern context.
Clementine Ford is no stranger to speaking out. This makes her a near-perfect poster person for the Stella’s schools program and their latest project Girls Write Up – a day-long wordfest and workshop for…
Writers are vital to today’s increasingly story-driven video games. Readers are active players and everything in the game – from the environment to the rules – can shape the narrative.
This is a story about stories. Who writes them. Who owns them and what happens when the two things get muddled. It’s a story about true stories, life stories, stories written by amateurs and professionals…
Charlotte Wood has won the fourth annual Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things, a dark and dangerous book shot through with a kind of feminist rage that – after decades of anti-feminist backlash…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first sentence of a novel sets the tone. Our new column, On Writing, explores the wonderful world of opening lines: from Tolstoy to Elmore Leonard.