For many years, the Miles Franklin award was a bastion of monoculture. But this year’s stories are a diverse reflection of Australia.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Australian literature
Displaying 181 - 200 of 248 articles
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.
A Stella winner is a book that challenges its readers; it attempts to do a bit of work in the world. And this year’s shortlist doesn’t disappoint.
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.
Forget Wonder Woman and Batman. The Maid of Orléans - an uneducated, teenage girl who led armies to victory - is a hero for our times.
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?
Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.
The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
All five novels explore alienation. But each is remarkably readable; with a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot.
Arab-Australian identity is not some singular, homogeneous label. Rather it exists as a spectrum and contains more complexity and diversity than the mainstream media allow.
There are many similarities between blockbusting young adult novels such as The Hunger Games series and Australian books such as Taronga – but there are also clear differences in their messages for the young.
Joan London’s The Golden Age won the Kibble Award last week, having been shortlisted – but unsuccessful – in several high-profile prizes previously. Deciding on winners is a highly subjective process.
If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.
Top contributors
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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Dean of Research (Creative), University of South Australia
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Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, RMIT University
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Charles Sturt University
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Associate Professor of English, Australian National University
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland
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Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
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Senior Lecturer, Literature and Gender Studies, Victoria University
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Associate Professor, Writing and Literature, University of Tasmania
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Lecturer, Creative Writing, UNSW Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, RMIT University
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Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
