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…
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Articles on Books
Displaying 721 - 740 of 848 articles
As a bookseller, I frequently find myself in conversations with customers about “appropriateness” when choosing literature for young readers – and these often conflict with research I have encountered…
“We knew it in words, yet kept it secret,” says Frances, the young sister-in-law of Patrick Logan, the eponymous – and notoriously cruel – commandant of Moreton Bay penal colony in Jessica Anderson’s ground-breaking…
I recently found myself at a bookshop at Sydney’s domestic airport with less than ten minutes until my plane boarded. Scanning around frantically for something to read, my eyes were immediately drawn to…
Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. So said Elmore Leonard, prolific author of westerns, short stories and crime novels. He died last…
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…
The books we’ll be buying for Christmas are making themselves known, their places in the various longlists and shortlists fiercely discussed in the papers. Every named writer wins a sticker on their book…
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…
In recent years there has been a significant shift in understandings of transgender identity. So often caught up with ideas about sexuality, the liberalisation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians has…
Learn this labyrinth, Holly … so if you ever needed to, you could navigate it in the darkness. So Jacko, Holly Sykes’s “freaky little brother”, says as he hands his sister a “diabolical”, nine-circled…
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…
My early teenage summers were spent either on trips to India with my sister to see our friends and family, or at home in the UK. In either place they were full of long days spent reading on a veranda or…
As soon as the teaching term finished, I went into the bookshop to buy some holiday reading. I came away with three books: no tomes these. They were all graphic novels. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic…
The idea that entertainment has an effect on our politics might seem ludicrous to some. Many would scoff at the notion that the Star Wars saga might have influenced the political socialisation of Generation…
This year’s Edinburgh fringe has seen the UK premiere of Siddhartha: The Musical. The show is based on the classic novel Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse, winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature…
I don’t often re-read books, partly because there are so many on my unread pile. There are just a few that I go back to over and over again: Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bell Jar – and Lucky Jim…
Poetry for the Palace, an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Holyrood House, has been timed (its website proclaims) to mark the halfway point of Carol Ann Duffy’s laureateship. The exhibition places the openly…
Welcome to Guilty Pleasures, a summer series in which academics reveal their most embarrassing cultural inclinations. Ever wanted to know what literature professors delve into on holiday, when they can’t…
My Night with Reg, Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play, has returned to the London stage, poignantly only a few weeks after the death of the playwright. Set in London’s gay community in the 1980s, the play follows…
Virginia Woolf – so Hermione Lee writes in Virginia Woolf, her 1997 biography of the celebrated writer – thought it immensely difficult to ever know another person. Today the winner of the 2014 National…
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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Lecturer, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney
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Honorary Associate in Creative Writing, The Open University
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Executive Dean (interim) Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
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Lecturer of English, University of Liverpool
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Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Canberra, University of Canberra
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Professor in Publishing Studies, University of Stirling
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Dean of Research (Creative), University of South Australia
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Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Education, University of Notre Dame Australia
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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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Professor, University of Stavanger
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Adjunct assistant professor, University of New England
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Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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Director, Monash University Publishing, Monash University
