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“…when Antony and Dolabella were accused of plotting revolution, Caesar said: ‘I am not much in fear of these fat, long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones,’ meaning Brutus and Cassius” – Plutarch, ‘The Parallel Lives‘ Plots and Prayers by Niki Savva is a fast-paced chronicle of the events that led to the ousting of
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Down our road and around the corner, people have recently built a tiny house on what was once grazing land. It’s on my drive into town, so for the past year or two, I’ve been checking out their progress. First, up went a very large shed, with solar panels on the roof. Then, in went
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There were too many stars at the Byron Bay Writers Festival (August 2 to 4) to mention, but let’s mention Mellissa Lucashenko, for winning the Miles Franklin Prize two days the fest opened, AC Grayling (below) for drawing the biggest crowd while also being a white-haired old white man, and all those African-Australian writers who introduced
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Ah Louise…. She’s done it again. Seriously, if she didn’t exist, we’d need to invent her. Not a decade had gone by since she took over the loose and gently swaying reins of the perennial plodder Australian Book Review in 1988 (and, with her customary style, both made and almost destroyed it) without another dramatic
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God needs a name change. It’s time to park the old God jalopy in the shed and force ourselves to walk for a while, free to contemplate all the wonderful stuff that has gathered in under the word that the Bible says was the start of it all – without all the distracting stuff that
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By Shane Murphy
About five years ago, I picked up a copy of Koraly Dimitriadis’ first book of poetry – Love and Fuck Poems – in a bookshop in Fitzroy. Idly flipping its pages, I realised that she was writing with a fire and fervour that I hadn’t seen much in recent times. I was hooked straight away,
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Andrew McGahan’s first book, the disturbingly comic Praise, defined him as a Queensland writer, and that stuck. Even though he has written books set in Sydney and Canberra, even though he has lived in Melbourne for decades, the sultry indolence of Brisbane in that Vogel-Award winner back in 1992 perfectly matched the tone and delivery
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When we read true crime, we might think it’s about trying to work out why people commit murder, what leads to awful events, and how society deals with it. It may, at the same time, feel prurient to be peering into the windows of a house where someone was killed, or to hear in dramatic
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Stuart Kells is a rare kind of writer. He is able to tackle global economic power on one hand, and, on the other, write with panache and credibility about whether Shakespeare was a literary conspiracy. He has a friendly, warm style, and packs in heaps of information without lecturing. If ours were a more populous
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Since Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Australia’s representation on the most influential of Western literary prizes has been zilch. Not one Australian novel has made the longlist, let alone the shortlist. Certainly, the competition has increased, since the prize opened to the United
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