Patrick White c.1940.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The aura of a major literary prize will inevitably fade. What we are left with is the work itself.
Sam Roberts/State Theatre Company of South Australia
Verity Laughton’s stage adaptation of Pip Williams’ best-selling book is a a very clever realisation.
Keith Luke/Unsplash
A new book designed to interest potential and beginning readers also offers plenty of new ideas to interest well-versed Murnanians.
Charmian Clift in Greek costume (1941).
Frederick Stanley Grimes/State Library of New South Wales
Australian writer Charmian Clift was born 100 years ago today. One rivetting photograph of Clift captures the existential yin and yang explored in her work.
Allegory of the Immaculate Conception – Gregorio Vasquez de Arce y Ceballos (1638–1711).
Public domain
Some fairy tales tell the brutal truth, others offer the hope of a happy ending. Immaculate raises the possibility of both.
Dolly Maunder.
Text Publishing
Family memoir and reimagined history dovetail beautifully in Kate Grenville’s latest novel.
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu.
Leah Jing Macintosh
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s witty, ‘effervescent’ debut novel follows a Sylvia-Plath-loving young Malaysian-Australian writer’s journey to ‘the heart of empire’ in the UK.
Ali Cobby Eckermann.
Jalaru Photography/Magabala Books
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first book since winning the Windham Campbell Prize may well prove her most enduring.
Daniel Boud/Sydney Theatre Company
The Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of the book is both more poignant and more life-affirming from the dry bones of the original.
A 1946 nuclear weapon test by the US military at Bikini Atoll, Micronesia.
rawpixel
In the 1957 worldwide bestseller, Australia is – briefly – the last habitable place on earth, following a nuclear world war. One character asks, as they wait to die: ‘Why did all this happen to us?’
Detail from The Dog – Francisco Goya (c.1820).
Public domain.
The Pole and Other Stories explores familiar Coetzeean themes of love, death, ageing, art and human-animal interaction.
Henry Lawson (left) and Judith Wright.
Henry Lawson said deafness was ‘in a great measure responsible for my writing’. Wright said hers was ‘part of the conditions I live under’. Their disability was inherent to their creativity.
Frederic Paulussen/Unsplash
In speaking to the moment, poets are bringing the apocalypse to Australian literature.
Belshazzar’s Feast – Rembrandt (c.1636).
Public domain
Jen Craig’s new novel Wall confirms she is an ambitious writer in the best sense: she wants to convey deeply conflicted and even contradictory states of being in the world.
Peter Carey speaking in Melbourne, January 26, 2002.
Julian Smith/AAP
In her latest book, Sarah Krasnostein goes straight for the soul of Peter Carey’s writing.
Prague skyline (August 2021).
Denis Poltoradnev/Unsplash
Call Me Marlowe is a cosmopolitan novel that that challenges our commitments to national stories.
Shutterstock
The Anniversary is a clever reflection on the relationship between art and life.
A new poetry collection takes falling as its unifying theme, but the contents suggest something more horizontal and glitchy.
John Tranter (1943-2023). Photo: Susan Gordon-Brown.
University of Queensland Press.
John Tranter’s poetry was defined by his relentless desire to experiment.
Grass Yellow Butterfly, Australian Butterfly Sanctuary, Kuranda, Queensland.
David Clode/Unsplash
Alexis Wright’s latest novel is an elegy and an ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty: innovative, visionary, and volcanic in its rage.