A close friend of John Curtin, Dame Mary Gilmore wrote poems on topics such as colonial violence and the plight of the koala. How has her great, great nephew, Scott Morrison, chosen to remember her?
The first three winners of the Stella Prize, at the 2015 ceremony. Left to right: Clare Wright (2014, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka), inaugural winner Carrie Tiffany (2013, Mateship with Birds) and Emily Bitto (2015, The Strays).
The Stella Prize, Connor Tomas O'Brien
As conversations about literary representation evolve, so does the Stella Prize. Five of the 12 authors on the tenth Stella Prize longlist are Indigenous, one is non-binary, and genre is in the mix.
Sylvia Plath wrote a series of 14 intensely personal letters to her psychologist that were only recently uncovered.
Amy T. Zielinski/Getty Images
Two poems that were originally excised from ‘Ariel,’ Plath’s seminal poetry collection, vividly channel the painful experience of losing an unborn child.
Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano de Bergerac is missing the famous nose.
Universal Pictures
‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’ is one of the most famous American poems. But who wrote it?
Why did she do all the work while Santa got all the glory? What would happen if she delivered the toys?
Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Many early stories praise her work ethic and devotion. But with Mrs. Claus usually hitting the North Pole’s glass ceiling, some writers started to push back.
Epic poetry tends to be seen as highbrow, while action films are regarded as puerile and brutish. But the two share an affinity for dressing up brutal deaths with rhetorical flair.
The 2,000-line poem by Scottish physician John Armstrong was written during a time of pandemic, war and increasing public disinformation. What can readers learn from it today?
There are different versions of ‘English’ in different states, with various titles and levels of difficulty. It’s important to choose the right one to reach your desired destination.
Best known for his big historical novels, Scott was also a bestselling poet and a fine short-story writer who brought a vivid portrayal of Scots and Scotland to the world.
Portrait of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (no date), colour photograph of oil painting
Wollombi Endeavour Museum
Dunlop’s 1838 poem, The Aboriginal Mother, about the suffering inflicted at the Myall Creek massacre, made the new immigrant from Ireland locally notorious.
In popular films and TV shows, poetry is typically used to express human feelings. This popular wisdom chimes with findings in cognitive neuroscience about how language works.
Giovanni Cariani, Portrait of Two Young Men. The bulk of the sonnets are addressed to a young man known as the ‘fair youth’.
Addressed to a ‘fair youth’ and later, ‘a dark lady’, the sonnets are less well known than Shakespeare’s plays. A journey into them is an unsettling and beguiling literary adventure.
Rhyming means something different in ASL than it does in spoken language.
Zed Sevcikova Sehyr
In American Sign Language, some words rhyme, some look like what they mean and some are used more often than others. A new database of these features paves a pathway for ASL research.