English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier…
A relief at the ancient Persian city of Persepolis (now in modern Iran), including inscriptions in cuneiform, the world’s oldest form of writing.
Diego Delso/Wikimedia
Cuneiform was used for over 3,000 years in the Ancient Near East, but was only decoded in the 19th century. The writing form is still revealing amazing stories, from literature to mathematics.
Josephine Wilson has won the 2017 Miles Franklin award for her novel Extinctions. Judging panel chair Richard Neville stated Wilson’s novel, “explores ageing, adoption, grief and remorse, empathy and self-centredness…
The ability to write quickly and effortlessly allows children to focus on translating ideas into writing.
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Writing is a fundamental outcome indicator of learning across subjects and grades. The latest NAPLAN results tell us we need to do more to empower children with these skills.
Ontario is the only Canadian province to offer a unique two-year, full-day and play-based kindergarten model.
(Shutterstock)
Do you read Australia’s First Nations writers? If not, why not? The time is well overdue for non-indigenous Australians to engage with the original inhabitants of the country.
In some Aboriginal communities, over 50% of adults say they do not have the literacy they need for everyday tasks.
Literacy for Life Foundation/Adam Sharman
The children who are least likely to attend school regularly – and do well – grow up in households where the adults themselves have very poor literacy skills.
Writing has never been easy, but sending writers out to find new ideas and people might be one way to help.
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Writers like Frank Moorhouse and Ben Eltham have proposed new long-term fellowships to support writing. But a better way may be more smaller grants, offering opportunities for travel.
Writer Solita Solano and Djuna Barnes in Paris, 1920s.
Wikipedia Commons
Unlike earlier lesbian and gay movements whose politics depended on visible identities, queer theory grew out of a critique of this – and perhaps that’s where Djuna Barnes sits.
William Faulkner’s typewriter in Mississippi. The writing life may sound idyllic, but it was often a furious battle to make ends meet.
Visit Mississippi/Flickr
An artist’s depiction of the ‘shibboleth incident.’
Detail from art by H. de Blois, from The Bible and Its Story Taught by One Thousand Picture Lessons, vol. 3, edited by Charles F. Horne and Julius A. Bewer, 1908
Going as far back as the Bible, and as widely known as the phrase ‘Open, Sesame,’ passwords are a textual link to our past. But they may not be around much longer.
A bust of newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer looks on as reporters look through a box containing the announcements of the 1996 Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University.
AP Photo/Wally Santana
U.S. journalism has long championed an allegiance to cold objectivity. But one researcher analyzed Pulitzer Prize-winning stories from the past 20 years and found that they’re suffused with emotion.
Vladimir and Vera Nabokov in 1969.
Giuseppe Pino, Wikimedia Commons