The narrator of Charlotte Wood’s new novel has shed her life to live with nuns. The world intrudes in the form of COVID, a mouse plague and recovered bones, delivered by someone from her past.
Old women remain the butt of jokes; they are some of society’s most marginalised people. But age also invites us to become our most authentic selves, writes Carol Lefevre.
Funding for writing and publishing is not just low: it’s also declining. Ben Eltham looks at a grim federal budget for literature, in the context of ongoing neglect for written culture in Australia.