John Hersey’s article Hiroshima (1946) is seminal in historical and literary terms: the shocking realities of the atomic bomb demanded a new way of writing.
We need to consider what balance we want to achieve between the heritage and contemporary arts.
AAP Image/Julian Smith. Artists of the Australian Ballet rehearse for the The Dream.
Given the pressure being applied to the majority of people working in the arts sector, we would be foolish not to consider the roles and inherited rights of Australia’s major performing companies.
If you’re a screenwriter, it’s Hollywood or bust.
Mark Poprocki/Shutterstock.com
Victor Hugo famously claimed the invention of the printing press destroyed the edifice of the gothic cathedral. Others fear the internet age will eventually destroy the novel. But guess what? It won’t.
But when academics retire it’s far from clear what this means.
Sal/Flickr
When your local butcher or grocer retires, it’s perfectly clear what this means. They are no longer there in the shop when you next go in. Someone else has taken over, or the shop has changed to another…
Suspense on screen comes from manipulating the obstructions between the audience and what they know is coming.
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Recently one of my Masters students, a filmmaker from the Czech Republic, told me his friends back at home were completely baffled that he was in Australia studying creative writing. You were either creative…
Literary translation has occurred for centuries (the Bible is a prime example). And with Nobel Prize winners like French author Patrick Modiano, it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Wikimedia Commons
I recently stumbled upon a post that describes the process of literary translation as “soul-crushing.” That’s news to me, and I’ve been engaged in literary translation for the better part of four decades…
Literary awards can have a profound impact on sales – and, in the future, which books get published and promoted.
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There’s a lot of attention right now on diversity in children’s books – or, more accurately, the lack of it. It’s not a new problem. White people have been talking about this issue since Nancy Larrick…
This post is the third in my series about print-on-demand and book publishing. The Small Press Network (SPN) is a not-for-profit incorporation with more than 120 small publisher members. The 3rd annual…
We know a good piece of writing when we read it. But what makes the writing “good” and how can we teach all our kids the skills that seem to come naturally to a few. Here are six principles teachers and…
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…
Bic is gathering handwriting samples to produce a new typeface.
Caligrafia
Pen maker Bic has been asking people around to world to submit their handwriting so it can produce what it is calling the Universal Typeface. Although the experiment is not claiming to have any scientific…
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…
Writing is something of a lawless place. Lawless, because there’s no clear indication that your effort will bring success; or that an answer will ever emerge from the mud; or that the most insane, most…
Videogames have the capacity to be complex and engaging in ways not possible in other media.
Koen Van Weel/EPA
Games writers dream up characters, dialogue, motivations and plot much like film screenwriters. But rather than keeping an audience captive for two or three hours at a time as in cinema, gamers will play…
Filer’s work is based on experiences as a psychiatric nurse.
Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
“I live a Cut & Paste kind of life”. So the narrator of Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall tells us. But in terms of its daring exploration of a life little understood and left in shadow, there is…
Digital technology has changed what, when, where and how we read.
zandwacht
There is a section early in Richard House’s transmedia novel The Kills – published this year by Pan Macmillan and long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize – in which the protagonist, Ford, is on the run…