The 2023 Stella Prize shortlist was unveiled this morning on RN Breakfast, an ABC radio station. The following six titles have been selected: We Come With This Place by Debra Dank big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt Hydra by Adriane Howel … | Continue reading
It takes ten-thousand hours to become an expert. Or so some people claim. Malcolm Gladwell made the assertion in his 2008 book, Outliers. Broken down, if ten-thousand hours are required to become proficient at something, it will take about five years to achieve expert status. Ass … | Continue reading
It’s been ten years since Philipp Dettmer founded educational science portal Kurzgesagt. To mark the milestone, their latest video looks at Kurzgesagt’s inner workings, and explores how the operation is financed. There may not be too much for science enthusiasts to take away, but … | Continue reading
Ayat as not seen, nor spoken to, her mother, Khadija, and sister, Laila, who live in Canberra, for six years. Ayat hurriedly moved away to Melbourne after her mother and sister learned she was dating Harry, a Catholic. Ayat made clear her boyfriend would not convert to Islam, the … | Continue reading
Constance Grady, writing for Vox, on the impact BookTok — the book lovers’ community within video-sharing platform TikTok — has had on book sales in recent years. In terms of the American book market at least, BookTok is almost unrivalled when it comes to selling books. That coul … | Continue reading
Irish author Sally Rooney, writing for The Irish Times, about the end of an eviction moratorium that may render many people homeless: The wave of evictions expected to begin from the end of this month is not merely theoretical: we already know that during the period of the ban, t … | Continue reading
Changes are coming to the voting process used to select the winner of the Packing Room Prize, traditionally the first award made in the annual Archibald Prize for Australian portraiture. In short, Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) packers unbox and install the works for the Archibald Pr … | Continue reading
Tasmania based Australian author Robbie Arnott’s 2022 novel, Limberlost, has been named on the shortlist of the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize. Limberlost joins five other titles on this year’s shortlist: Seven Steeples by Sara Baume God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ife … | Continue reading
Gavin Jones is the in-house counsel at a large mining company, headquartered in Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland. In his role, Jones awards legal contracts worth millions of dollars each year. As such, legal firms in Brisbane, and across Australia, are … | Continue reading
Artwork by Aretha Brown. The biennial Birrarangga Film Festival runs from Thursday 23 March, through to Tuesday 28 March 2023, in Melbourne: BIRRARANGGA Film Festival celebrates Global Indigenous Films that explore the curatorial themes of ‘strength, resilience and the environmen … | Continue reading
Jinghua Qian, writing for ArtsHub, about working as a sensitivity reader: I might notice that the portrayal of a cultural activity is off: Australians talk about going ‘to the footy’ but not ‘to the ball game’. The article I link to was published about three and a half years ago. … | Continue reading
Twenty-one years after he made Amélie, full title The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, starring Audrey Tautou, the film’s director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has revealed Amélie was actually a KGB spy. He makes the startling admission in a short film, Amelie: the Real Story, which use … | Continue reading
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by American interdisciplinary artist and writer Anne de Marcken, and Tell, by British author and teacher Jonathan Buckley, have been named joint winners of the 2022 Novel Prize. The Novel Prize is a biennial award for a book-length work of lit … | Continue reading
Craig Silvey has taken out both the Indie Book of the Year award, and the Children’s book gong, in the 2023 Indie Book Awards. The Indie Book of the Year award: Runt by Craig Silvey Fiction: Horse by Geraldine Brooks Non-fiction: The Book Of Roads And Kingdoms by Richard Fidler D … | Continue reading
Generation Z, being people born between 1997 and 2015, prefer to read paper books rather than electronic ones, according to World Economic Forum data. A break from eye-straining smartphone screens, a desire to support local bricks and mortar book stores, and the smell of newly pu … | Continue reading
Fleur Morrison, writing at Readability: I have a love/hate relationship with politics. I love that we have a stable form of politics in Australia, even though sometimes it can get a little heated and it certainly isn’t without its problems. But I hate that it has taken over write … | Continue reading
Ashley Kalagian Blunt discusses her new novel Dark Mode, with Dani Vee on the Words and Nerds podcast. Plenty of talk about the dark web, which features prominently in the novel. | Continue reading
Deciding to donate our bodily organs, perhaps in the event of our unexpected demise, is a decision we make, then largely forget about. After all, when the time comes, we won’t be around to think about it, nor appreciate the difference doing so might make to the lives of others. F … | Continue reading
Australian literary podcaster Claudine Tinellis talks with Sydney based author Dianne Yarwood on her show, Talking Aussie Books. Much of the discussion is about Yarwood’s debut novel, The Wakes, which I also wrote about the other week. | Continue reading
Fear of litigation is prompting some Australian publishers to reject manuscripts for titles they think may be contentious, particularly books about controversial public figures. Melbourne based writer and editor Hilary McPhee, says poorer quality books are the result, if public i … | Continue reading
There’s a few tech origin-story films around that the moment. The Playlist is about the founding of music streaming service Spotify, while BlackBerry backgrounds the invention of one of the first smartphones, being, obviously, the BlackBerry. But here’s the one we’ve been waiting … | Continue reading
Jeannie Kidera, writing for Big Think: The capacity for empathy — to first identify and then understand and share in someone else’s feelings — is largely held as a virtue these days. Yet, philosophically speaking, there is a bit of a knowledge problem that makes being naturally e … | Continue reading
London based writer and reviewer Susie Mesure, writing for The Guardian: Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I … | Continue reading
The Sydney Writers Festival 2023 program was published this evening, and features a star studded line-up of Australian and international speakers. Among them are former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Sydney author Tracey Lien, Tasmasian writer Robbie Arnott, and Fiona M … | Continue reading
The 2023 International Booker Prize longlist was unveiled yesterday, and features eleven novels published internationally, which have been translated into English. The 2023 judges are looking for the best work of international fiction translated into English, selected from entrie … | Continue reading
Filippo Bernardini, also known as the Spine Collector, was arrested in early 2022, after stealing the manuscripts of numerous high profile authors. Bernardini managed to convince his victims — who included Sally Rooney and Margaret Atwood — to send the manuscripts of their latest … | Continue reading
If you felt like a fish out of water during your school days, spare a thought for seventeen year old Lucy. She’s just been enrolled at Drake’s College, a school nurturing the magical talent of young people, located in Perth, Western Australia. But there’s only one thing: Lucy’s n … | Continue reading
Presently about fourteen percent of Australians do not own a smartphone, while some seventeen percent do not use social media. So although a minority, they don’t exactly — no pun intended — stand in isolation. Twenty-something Sydneysider Reagan Carsen is a person who resides in … | Continue reading
Gender Queer: A Memoir, a graphic novel written and illustrated by American cartoonist and author Maia Kobabe, has been removed from the shelves of a Queensland library, according to a 9News report. Local police have since referred the publication to the Australian Classification … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Eli Digital Creative. To mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, Britain’s Baillie Gifford literary prize, which recognises excellence in non-fiction writing, is holding a Winner of Winners Award to select the best title — the best of the best, if you like — among th … | Continue reading
Before she lost her job, Anja sold antique furniture at an auction house in Melbourne, capital of the Australian state of Victoria. The pieces she prepared for sale though were more than mere objects to her. These aged items of furniture, and bric-a-brac, were possessed of intric … | Continue reading
A ten year high school reunion goes horribly awry, after a tidal wave transforms the venue into an island, leaving old students of an all-girls school stranded. Will the former school-mates co-operate, or will tensions and rivalries from their school days resurface and overwhelm … | Continue reading
The 2023 Penguin Literary Prize shortlist, consisting of six manuscripts by new and emerging Australian writers of literary fiction, has been unveiled: The Elementals by Liz Allan The Boy Who Wept Rabbits by Benjamin Forbes Falling and Burning by Michael Krockenberger Jade and Em … | Continue reading
Canberra based Australian author and anthropologist Diane Bell, was yesterday named recipient of the 2023 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Diane was awarded $20,000 for her proposed biography of the relationship between Ngarrindjeri woman Louisa Karpany, née Kontinyeri (c … | Continue reading
It was the title of Thirst for Salt, published by Allen & Unwin in April 2023, the debut novel of New York based Australian author Madelaine Lucas, that initially piqued my curiosity. What did the name refer to? Was it a reference to the setting of the story, an isolated coastal … | Continue reading
In the ten years since its establishment, winners of the Stella Prize have seen pleasing increases in sales of their books, says Jaclyn Booton, executive director of the Australian literary award: She says the impact of the Stella, on writers and readers, grows exponentially over … | Continue reading
Over fifty percent of books published in 2020 in the United States, were written by women, says Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota: By analyzing data from Goodreads, Bookstat, Amazon, and the National Library of Congress, Waldfogel found that women’s shar … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of David Condrey. A few weeks ago film production company Warner Brothers announced plans to make a raft of new movies based on the Lord of the Rings volumes, written by J.R.R. Tolkien. Many of these new movies will be set several hundred years before events depict … | Continue reading
Finding someone to publish science fiction in Australia is difficult but not wholly impossible. A number of Australian authors report difficulty in having works of anything other than contemporary or literary fiction published locally, forcing them to take their work to overseas … | Continue reading
The annual State of the (Writing) Nation address was presented on Wednesday 1 March 2023, in conjunction with Writers Victoria and the Wheeler Centre, by Melbourne based Australian author Jennifer Down. In short, the state of the Australian writing nation is not good. Down, winne … | Continue reading
A secluded, comfortable, cabin deep in the woods, without internet or phone access, seems like the ideal location to spend a writer’s residency. But writing without day to day distractions may not be as conducive to productivity as it sounds, says American author Alice Robb, writ … | Continue reading
The 2023 Stella Prize longlist was announced this evening by Melbourne based Australian author Alice Pung. The twelve books are: The Furies by Mandy Beaumont Every Version of You by Grace Chan We Come With This Place by Debra Dank big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills The … | Continue reading
Law makers in the United States are considering legislation to ban the use of video sharing app TikTok, citing national security concerns: On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee was expected to move forward with a bill that would give President Joe Biden the authority to … | Continue reading
I’m yet to read The Wakes, published by Hachette Australia, March 2023, by Sydney based Australian author Dianne Yarwood, but I’m already convinced it could be adapted to film. I’ve even thought of a name: Four Funerals and a Divorce. I’m not actually sure a divorce even occurs i … | Continue reading
The NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2023 shortlists were announced today, with Australian written works nominated across more than twelve prize categories. Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au, Grimmish by Michael Winkler, The Upwelling by Lystra Rose, Another Day in the Colony by Ch … | Continue reading
The stories of three women, living millennia apart, form a single, though not immediately obvious, thread that runs through One Illumined Thread, published by HarperCollins, March 2023, the debut novel of Australian author Sally Colin-James. A young woman living two thousand year … | Continue reading
Melissa Clark-Reynolds and Beth Barany talk about writing science fiction on the Writer’s Fun Zone podcast. One point that emerges is science fiction’s relevance to contemporary matters on planet Earth. This at a time when some Australian publishers have no interest in looking at … | Continue reading
There’s all sorts of reasons, but a lack of time to seek out new compositions, and not simply a love of “old music”, is one: One explanation for the age-based reduction in music consumption simply posits that responsibility-laden adults may have less discretionary time to explore … | Continue reading