The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were instituted in 2008 by Kevin Rudd. The lucrative prizes survived the recent “tough” federal budget, despite fears that they would be axed in the manner of the Queensland…
For the pre-internet fiction writer, with imagination as staple source of material, it was possible, theoretically, to proceed from the first written word to the last without needing to leave the desk…
Speculation is rife as to who will win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The prize, which launched as the Orange Prize in 1996, has a distinguished list of former winners, including Kate Grenville…
Nicolas Suzor, Queensland University of Technology and Suzannah Wood, Queensland University of Technology
An estimated 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired. Some 90% of those live in developing nations, where less than 1% of the world’s books are available in a form they can read. In developed…
Death is a funny thing. It creeps up on us all, or surprises us if we are unlucky (or lucky, depending on the circumstances). For a writer, especially a self-confessed solipsist such as Clive James, the…
Speaking about poetry that has “connived at its own irrelevance”, Jeremy Paxman recently called for an inquisition, in which poets would have to explain their use of language to the public. “That’d be…
Should Australians be as familiar with David Williamson as with Shakespeare? Should we measure our Jane Austen with sufficient doses of Miles Franklin? Britain has recently revised the GCSE (General Certificate…
Writing is something of a lawless place. Lawless, because there’s no clear indication that your effort will bring success; or that an answer will ever emerge from the mud; or that the most insane, most…
Do you think of poetry as a quaint hobby or an antiquated riddle? Think again. If you haven’t been keeping up with Australian poetry this year, you’re missing some of the country’s most exciting avant-garde…
Historical fiction is booming. The much-publicised success of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is just the tip of the iceberg for a genre that rivals…
It’s been 21 years since the publication of Irvine Welsh’s groundbreaking and controversial novel, Trainspotting. Since then, it has been widely praised and criticised, rejected by a mainstream audience…
Over the past few months children’s fiction has hardly been out of the news. Early March saw the launch of the “Let Books be Books” campaign, aimed at persuading publishers against titling or packaging…
If you’ve been involved in internet discussions about sensitive topics like sexual abuse, you may have seen the letters “TW”, short for “trigger warning”. The convention originated primarily on feminist…
When you see almost complete shelves of abandoned copies of The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades of Grey in charity shops, their near total worthlessness seems to suggest that an individual copy of a book…
Staring at a blank page is daunting. Where to make the first mark? As designers have known for centuries, one way is to start with a grid. A grid is a structure of lines used by designers to help organise…
Tap on me, click on me, publish me! We live in an era of a digital selfie obsession. There is a growing tendency to create self-centred digital environments. You only need to look at a few Facebook profiles…
If you had to argue for the merits of one Australian book, one piece of writing, what would it be? Welcome back to our occasional series in which our authors make the case for a work of their choosing…
The exam board OCR recently announced a new English Language and Literature A Level that they intend to offer from 2015. The proposed syllabus boasts that “the range of texts to be studied is to be the…
After years spent securing funds and permissions, a team of forensic scientists and historians have launched an intensive search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Using the…
The old German saying Stadt Luft Macht Frei (“urban air makes you free”) is the defining injunction of modernity. Modern western cities were launched as the vessels of liberation from a human era darkened…