This morning the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, won the 2014 Man Booker prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The novel centres on one of the key events in Australia’s war…
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Is there still a Commonwealth culture? And, if so, will the “cultural flavour” of the Man Booker Prize, as two-times Booker winner Peter Carey recently described it, be lost now that Americans are eligible…
There is a tendency in academic job applications to refer to the “prestigious x prize (or fellowship)” that a candidate has been awarded. It’s a phrase that turns out to be self-contradictory, since all…
This is not the first response to writer and radio presenter Helen Razer’s recent piece on young adult (YA) fiction in the Daily Review, the latest in a trend to either shame adult readers who enjoy the…
Yesterday’s decision to confer the Nobel Prize for Literature on revered French novelist Patrick Modiano has sent even the most widely-read English speaking critics scurrying to find copies of his books…
When something is wrong in the world of literature, who better to blame than the writers? Nobel Prize for Literature judge Horace Engdahl said this week, only days before the award was given to French…
The film Gone Girl (2014) is dividing critics along gender lines. Men see it as a gripping, fresh thriller while women have expressed alarm over a range of issues. Chief in recent days is criticism of…
As we’ve marked the centenary of the first world war in 2014, the great poets of that conflict – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke – have brought the literature of conflict into focus. But…
So, the Stella Count is in for 2013. These are annual statistics collected by the Stella Prize that measure the number of books by women that get reviewed in major publications and the number of books…
A frail risk analyst rediscovers his inner frontiersman in a devastating flood that hits Manhattan; an insightful rural woman glimpses the grace of god in the revelations of biological science; genetically…
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…
Dictators dislike detective novels. Both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany outlawed crime fiction in 1941. The crime novel, according to the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture, weakened the health of the…
Judith Armstrong spoke with Gessen when she was in Melbourne as a guest of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last week. You can listen to the extended interview here. In her biography of Vladimir Putin…
If my Facebook feed is anything to go by, last month parents scrabbled to make costumes of popular characters from children’s books. They were preparing for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s annual…
The Australian press has long been fascinated by the opinion that visiting celebrities hold about Australia. This obsession was excited by the written observations of Mark Twain, who visited in 1896, and…
We can blame the Brothers Grimm for stepmothers getting a bad rap. Mothers were frequently cruel to their offspring in fairytales until the Grimms decided in the process of collecting oral tales and transforming…
Last week, Penguin released a 50th-anniversary edition of Roald Dahl’s classic novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – to an astonishingly negative reception. Die-hard Dahl fans on Twitter were scathing…
Noted Works is a new series on The Conversation devoted to long-form reviews of significant new books. See the end for further details. Dennis Altman was a young, articulate activist and out gay man when…
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…
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology…
Top contributors
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Associate Professor in Literary Studies, Monash University
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
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Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
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Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
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Honorary Fellow of the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne
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Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Canberra, University of Canberra
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Senior Lecturer, Literature and Gender Studies, Victoria University
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Lecturer in Digital Arts & Humanities, University College Cork
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Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Professor of English, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, ACU, Australian Catholic University
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Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, La Trobe University
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Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
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Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, Monash University
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Visiting Professor, University of Technology Sydney
