A young Aboriginal woman falls in love with an escaped Japanese POW in 1944. Anita Heiss’ new book entwines romance with questions of enmity and friendship: who is fighting whom?
And we have a winner. Black Rock White City, AS Patric’s dark, sorrowful story has impressed the judges sufficiently for them to award it first prize. I too was captured by the world of the novel, and…
The search for a quintessentially Australian novel has turned up a formidable shortlist.
Reuters/David Gray
All five novels explore alienation. But each is remarkably readable; with a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot.
The new film version of Swallows and Amazons set in the Lake District.
Studio Canal
How the new film could inspire parents and children to head to the Lake District, to spend time canoeing, building campfires and reconnecting with nature.
Adaptations are a learned skill – can Australian cinema do it successfully?
The Dressmaker/Universal Pictures
With the success of films like The Dressmaker, book adaptations are giving a much needed boost to the Australian box office. So why are there so few? And why isn’t adaption a compulsory part of screen studies?
What could be better than browsing in a bookstore?
Snipergirl/flickr
Five years ago, the death knell was sounded for the bookshop. But the paper book, which offers hours of deliciously deep, screen-free reading, has not gone the way of Kodachrome. In fact, bookstores are staging a minor comeback.
Is it really worth all the effort to avoid spoilers?
'Man' via www.shutterstock.com
Contrary to popular belief, several recent studies suggest that plot spoilers don’t always make us like a film or books less – and may even make us like it more.
Seasons, stars, settler colonialism: the nations of the south – Australia, Argentina and South Africa – have much in common. And the 2003 Nobel laureate for literature, JM Coetzee, is helping reframe Australian writing within this southern context.
Supporters of presidential candidate José Mário Vaz cheer at a campaign rally in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, in 2014.
Reuters/Joe Penney
DeLillo’s latest novel dwells on the implications of accelerating technology – including the practice of freezing dead bodies in the hope that one day, they could become immortal.
If you read a translation of a book, have you read the book? Can language ever really tell you what someone else is thinking? Jhumpa Lahiri navigates these tricky waters in her memoir, In Other Words.
Characters with Down syndrome are extremely rare in novels and rarer still are stories written from their point of view. But people with disabilities have an equal right to belong in narrative fiction.
A whole world lies in these pages.
www.shutterstock.com/Sunny studio
Charlotte Brontë’s heroines - most famously Jane Eyre - struggle with psychologically complex questions. And unlike Jane Austen’s female protagonists, they prize self knowledge and self expression over conventional moralism.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first sentence of a novel sets the tone. Our new column, On Writing, explores the wonderful world of opening lines: from Tolstoy to Elmore Leonard.
The common grey silverfish, Ctenolepisma longicaudata, in Sydney.
Graeme Smith