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Articles on Australian literature

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Judith Wright: she opened our eyes to our dark history, to modernist poetry and to the beauty of our landscape. courtesy of Meredith McKinney

Friday essay: Judith Wright in a new light

Judith Wright was possibly our greatest poet and a passionate social activist. But a new biography suggests that in writing her family memoirs, Wright avoided evidence that her settler forebears likely participated in the murder of Aborigines.
Carl Rahl’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1852). Wikimedia

Guide to the classics: Christina Stead’s The Beauties and Furies

The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad asks us to reconsider who the insiders and outsiders are in modern Australia. Sally Tsoutas

Radical, young, Muslim: the Arab-Australian novel in the 21st century

Arab-Australian identity is not some singular, homogeneous label. Rather it exists as a spectrum and contains more complexity and diversity than the mainstream media allow.
The burden of creating a more inclusive, fairer and more tolerant society is carried by the younger generation. Hadi Zaher/Flickr

How Australian dystopian young adult fiction differs from its US counterparts

There are many similarities between blockbusting young adult novels such as The Hunger Games series and Australian books such as Taronga – but there are also clear differences in their messages for the young.
Deciding on the winner of a literary award is, in the end, a highly subjective process. RebeccaVC1

Literary awards and Joan London’s The Golden Age

Joan London’s The Golden Age won the Kibble Award last week, having been shortlisted – but unsuccessful – in several high-profile prizes previously. Deciding on winners is a highly subjective process.
Sofie Laguna last night became the fourth woman to win the Miles Franklin award in as many years. Allen&Unwin

Sofie Laguna’s Miles Franklin win helps keep half the world visible

If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.
Dramatic in its effect, Fly away Peter is a requiem to the fallen and damaged of the first world war. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Sydney Chamber Opera

Fly Away Peter on the opera stage is a masterful adaptation

One of the few Australian novels dealing with the first world war, David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter, has been adapted for the opera stage – and the Sydney Chamber Opera’s production is a great success.
An opera based on David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter opens in Sydney this weekend. Carriageworks/Toby Burrows

Fly Away Peter: when Australian literature goes to the opera

Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter opens this weekend. It’s not the first opera adaptation of Australian literature – and there are reasons to hope it’s not the last.
Bitto has remarked on the major impact of the Stella Prize and the conversations it has encouraged about women writers. Jone

Debut novelist Emily Bitto wins the Stella Prize

Emily Bitto has won the 2015 Stella Prize for her debut novel, The Strays. The prize is now in its third year and was established to redress the way in which women writers were typically overlooked for major literary prizes
The “MONA effect” has set Tasmania’s arts scene on fire – will Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker win do the same for its literature? EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA

The Flanagan effect: Tasmanian literature in the limelight

Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Man Booker Prize has put Tasmanian writing in the spotlight – and the announcement of new state literary prizes has helped too. So what is distinctive about Tasmanian literature?
The new waterfront in Australian literature: Parramatta. Lina Hayes/Flickr

The new Australian literary frontier: writing Western Sydney

Despite boasting a population of 2 million people – more than South Australia, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and the ACT combined – Western Sydney has, to date, had little impact on the literary pulse…
Bush balladeers celebrate the district, its identities and their adventures. Oceana/Flickr

Australian bush ballads keep galloping on

When Brian the farmer finished his poem the crowd went wild. Small wonder he earned the People’s Choice Award on the night. We were at a so-called poetry “slam” at a country hall in a place so tiny it…
Books do not necessarily bring us all together, tell ‘our’ story, unite us. AAP/Joe Castro

PM’s Literary Awards: how reading opens us to a world of pain

On Monday night, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced with a tie in the fiction category between A World of Other People by Steven Carroll and the Booker Prize and Queensland Literary Award…
Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest has won the inaugural Voss Literary Prize. Tambako The Jaguar/Flickr

The Voss Literary Prize celebrates a fine new Australian novel

The Voss Literary Prize, for which I was a judge, was awarded for the first time this week. The winner, Fiona McFarlane for her novel The Night Guest, was chosen from a shortlist that included Hannah Kent…
Nick Cater’s shortlisted work, The Lucky Culture, is one of several non-fiction options. AAP /Dean Lewins

The curious case of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

This year’s cultural debates about the constitution of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards judging panels are now giving way to consideration of the shortlists and their relative worth. Even as these…
The Robert Farquharson case raised questions about male violence that go unanswered. AAP Image/Julian Smith

Garner’s This House of Grief ducks some hard questions

Helen Garner isn’t usually thought of as a crime writer, but some of her best-known prose has been on law-breaking. She won the prestigious Walkley Award for her 1993 Time Magazine article on the murder…
We don’t seem to be able to shake our cultural status anxiety. EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga

The Book Club, Flanagan and our endemic cultural cringe

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…

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