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…
We don’t seem to be able to shake our cultural status anxiety.
EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga
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…
Richard Flanagan joins other Australian winners and contenders for the Booker.
EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA
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…
This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Patrick Modiano, a worthy - and noble - winner.
EPA/IAN LANGSDON
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…
YA fiction. It’s a thing. Get over it.
josefnovak33 Little Readers
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…
Secretary to the Swedish Academy Peter Englund emerges to announce the 2014 Nobel Prize winner.
EPA/ANDERS WIKLUND
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…
Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize for Literature – with what must be the right kind of transgression.
EPA/IAN LANGSDON
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…
David Fincher’s film shows the desolation of failed suburban promises.
Twentieth Century Fox
The film Gone Girl (2014) is dividing critics along gender lines. Men see it as a gripping, fresh thriller while women have expressed alarm over a range of issues. Chief in recent days is criticism of…
Could a work of fiction constitute a truth commission in its own right?
NCinDC
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…
Three of the five Miles Franklin award nominees for 2013 were women - but female authors are still underrepresented in the review pages.
AAP Image/Honner Media, Hamilton Churton
So, the Stella Count is in for 2013. These are annual statistics collected by the Stella Prize that measure the number of books by women that get reviewed in major publications and the number of books…
Could novels help us fight climate change?
Asian Development Bank/flickr
A frail risk analyst rediscovers his inner frontiersman in a devastating flood that hits Manhattan; an insightful rural woman glimpses the grace of god in the revelations of biological science; genetically…
Man Booker winner Eleanor Catton has funded a grant to let readers write.
EPA/TAL COHEN
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…
Why do dictatorships make such a compelling backdrop for crime fiction?
Dean Ayres/Flickr
Dictators dislike detective novels. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany outlawed crime fiction in 1941. The crime novel, according to the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture, weakened the health of the…
According to Masha Gessen, Vladimir Putin only thinks six weeks ahead.
Judith Armstrong spoke with Gessen when she was in Melbourne as a guest of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last week. You can listen to the extended interview here. In her biography of Vladimir Putin…
Social reading in book clubs helps readers make sense of big ideas through personal experience.
Susana Fernandez
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, last month parents scrabbled to make costumes of popular characters from children’s books. They were preparing for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual…
Frederick Waddy’s caricature of Anthony Trollope, the man who offended so many Australians with his assessment of our ways.
Wikimedia Commons
The Australian press has long been fascinated by the opinion that visiting celebrities hold about Australia. This obsession was excited by the written observations of Mark Twain, who visited in 1896, and…
We can blame the Brothers Grimm for stepmothers getting a bad rap. Mothers were frequently cruel to their offspring in fairytales until the Grimms decided in the process of collecting oral tales and transforming…
Penguin has touched a nerve by issuing a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover with no chocolate.
AAP /NEWZULU/SEE LI
Last week, Penguin released a 50th-anniversary edition of Roald Dahl’s classic novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – to an astonishingly negative reception. Die-hard Dahl fans on Twitter were scathing…
A new collection takes stock of the four decades that have passed since the publication of Dennis Altman’s landmark book, Homosexual.
malstad
Noted Works is a new series on The Conversation devoted to long-form reviews of significant new books. See the end for further details. Dennis Altman was a young, articulate activist and out gay man when…