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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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Say you wanted to write your own reactions to, and feelings about, what’s happened this week, the news as it’s reported on the internet alongside things that have happened in your personal life. You can blog or tweet, write articles for print and online newspapers and journals, but any stream of your consciousness is always
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The last book of any author is a testament to their talent. Some, like F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, are unfinished, unsatisfying and taken from them before they were done. Others, such as George Orwell’s 1984, are the culmination of a life’s work and perhaps unsatisfying because readers wonder what might have been with
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By Daily Review
The digital realm is not what it seems, and impacts on music curation in myriad and hidden ways, says Tully Barnett, one of the lead researchers in the Flinders University team Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture. Barnett and Julian Meyrick and Robert Phiddian are co-authors of What Matters? – Talking Value in Australian Culture (Monash University
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This wondrous book, What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson, has been called the work of someone old-fashioned, cranky and difficult. It appears that is now what we call writing that “will flame out like shining from shook foil”, to quote a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins as Robinson does herself to describe the unbounded
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All roads lead to Shakespeare. Atlas of emotions, roadmap of the soul, landscape of the inner terrain. These things are the geography of Shakespeare’s world. In his depiction and exploration of this place the internal battles do not change over the centuries. For at heart, the base elements of thought and deed are recognisable whether
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