He probably would have been amused by – and maybe even befriended – Trump the entertainer. Trump the president? Not so much.
Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility: a competent moral agent drawing only on her intelligence and experience.
Columbia Pictures Corporation
This year is the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death and her celebrity continues to grow. But relegating Austen’s work to plots about ‘whether the heroine gets her man’ belittles her achievement.
A termite mound in Cape Range National Park: WA’s geography has helped shape its writers.
Susanna Dunkerley/AAP
With its dramatic landscape, relative isolation and vibrant counter culture, Western Australia has a thriving writing scene. But government funding cuts are biting.
Shirley Hazzard, who passed away this week, was one of the great prose stylists of the last 50 years. A deeply intellectual autodidact, she championed the public duty of writers and the pleasure of reading.
Georgia Blain: Her work draws attention to the tiny incandescent moments that make up our lives.
Scribe Publications
The Australian writer Georgia Blain, who died last week, wrote extraordinary portraits of family relationships, in luminous prose, with devastating insight. And when she became ill, she wrote about her cancer.
On average year 3 girls perform higher than boys in reading, writing, grammar and punctuation, and spelling.
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The latest round of NAPLAN results show Australia’s school systems are not good at reducing the influence of a student’s background on their academic achievement.
A new phonics test won’t help us understand what the problems are. We need solutions.
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Being able to sound out letters in words doesn’t mean you can understand them. There is no clear evidence that a new phonics screening test for children in Year 1 will help improve reading levels.
Not every student will publish work or win prizes and very few will be able to earn a living putting pen to paper, but the teaching of creative writing is about more than that.
A wax model of Ernest Hemingway at Madame Tussauds in New York.
Anton_Ivanov/Shutterstock.com
Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn’t despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.
When did past simple tense become passé, I ask myself.
Tekke/Flickr
Writers, over the last decade, have been waxing lyrical about the rise of the present tense in English fiction. But this morning I read something entirely new – for me, at least. I read a manuscript written…
A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore.
Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons
In 1913, an Indian literary giant named Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-white person to win the literature prize. He wrote over 2,000 songs and, like Dylan’s, they still resonate today.
Lionel Shriver in 2014: her keynote address at the Brisbane Writers Festival on cultural appropriation has unleashed a torrent of opinion.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Lionel Shriver’s controversial speech about cultural appropriation has made headlines around the world. But the debate need not be a binary one – novelists might approach characters from other cultures as ‘thoughtful tourists’.
The Starship Enterprise, the famed setting of the original ‘Star Trek’ series, was almost lost to the graveyard of failed pilots.
alanoodle.com
With a pilot that was deemed too complex and cerebral, ‘Star Trek’ looked dead in the water. Fifty years later, we look back at the show’s rocky beginnings.
Children taking part in a philosophical discussion at Buranda State School in Brisbane.
Steve Gray/AAP
Do you know how to tailor and target your work to gain the attention of people beyond your own peers – including funding assessors, politicians and the media? Learn how at this one-day masterclass.
A Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, similar to the one Nietzsche used.
Peter Mitterhofer
The writing process is different whether your instrument is a fountain pen, a crayon, a typewriter or a computer. What fingerprints does the technology leave on the product?