Welcome to Guilty Pleasures, a summer series in which academics reveal their most embarrassing cultural inclinations. Ever wanted to know what literature professors delve into on holiday, when they can’t…
My Night with Reg, Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play, has returned to the London stage, poignantly only a few weeks after the death of the playwright. Set in London’s gay community in the 1980s, the play follows…
Shane Warne has lived his professional life in the public eye. Does this make it more difficult for a biographer to tell his story?
AAP Image/Mal Fairclough
Virginia Woolf – so Hermione Lee writes in Virginia Woolf, her 1997 biography of the celebrated writer – thought it immensely difficult to ever know another person. Today the winner of the 2014 National…
Good reviewers don’t need editors to fight their battles.
Luke Larsson
It is perfectly understandable for an editor to be protective of his own patch, but it is worrying when the editor of a national magazine, which claims to be the leading independent Australian literary…
Our book shelves would look very different.
Sharon Drummond
As we begin to commemorate the outbreak of World War I in earnest, just how central the “Great” war is to Britain’s conception of its history is ever more obvious. And this is also very true in terms of…
Mary’s poems give a unique insight into how the queen experienced her bloody, passionate and tragic life.
Dave McLear
Think Mary, Queen of Scots and a few key facts probably come to mind: she was Catholic, she was imprisoned and she had her head chopped off. But a poet who offers insight into 16th-century women’s writing…
This year’s run-up to the naming of the Man Booker Prize winner has just begun, with the announcement of the 13 novels that make up the longlist. They will soon be dissected and analysed by readers and…
What can be read between the handwritten lines of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables manuscript?
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The handwritten manuscript of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862) – from which the blockbuster stage show and numerous movies ultimately descend – has arrived at the State Library of Victoria (its…
Australian writing for young adults has moved on as has our thinking about what it means to be gay.
Pat Reynolds
Young adult fiction and complex themes go hand in hand – not least in one of the most recent entries to this field. Melbourne-based writer Eli Glasman’s debut novel The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper…
True story, seriously, it’s all about me.
Nathan O'Nions
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…
Can literary works play a productive part in the process of reconciliation?
butupa
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology…
When an author who insists he is “not really a social media animal” writes a Twitter story, we should at least raise an eyebrow. When that same author goes on to say he wrote the story at his publisher’s…
David Mitchell has moved from pen to tweet.
Ian West/PA Archive
Booker-shortlisted novelist David Mitchell is currently launching his new short story The Right Sort – on Twitter. The award-winning author of Cloud Atlas and number9dream is tweeting his story twice daily…
All serious writers should take their own work, and the efforts of others, seriously.
photosteve101
There should be no hard and fast rules concerning book reviewing. That’s because reviewing constitutes a worthy genre in its own right, one that should not be limited by guidelines or mandates. Criticism…
Nadine Gordimer died at her home, aged 90 on July 14 2014.
EPA/Alejandro Ernesto
The passing of Nadine Gordimer is a tremendous loss, both to South Africa and to the literary world. For me, and others who knew her, it will also be an enormous personal loss. Born in November 1923, Nadine…
David Malouf’s Imaginary Life plays out in the hillsides of the Black Sea. What’s so Australian about that?
Hans Juul Hansen
… further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands…
Given the extent of the brouhaha that has surrounded Shakespeare’s big 450, it’s worth remembering that we’re marking the anniversary of the birth of an enigma. Records do show that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon…
Let’s not underestimate the intellectual goodwill that sustains our literary culture.
Antoine Robiez
Book reviewers and the editors of periodicals that commission them are used to sour assessments of their worth, but Professor John Dale’s article on The Conversation yesterday is in a class of its own…
We all know a good review when we read one – but what actually differentiates a good review from a bad one?
Hartwig HKD
Good book reviews are all alike while every bad review is bad in its own way. In Australia reviews are often bad in many different ways. Historically the trade has consisted of retired English academics…
Many professional authors are also parents, but recently, there have been a number of success stories of parents simply writing for their own children and becoming very successful. And this recent surge…