Cold Enough for Snow, by Melbourne based Australian author Jessica Au, is a heart-warming story of a young woman and her mother, who holiday in Japan together. A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen … | Continue reading
Another day, another literary award shortlist announcement, this time it’s the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) shortlists. All up, seventy-one books have been shortlisted across fourteen categories, including Audiobook of the Year, Biography Book of the Year, several … | Continue reading
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, book cover. The 2023 International Booker Prize shortlist was announced earlier this evening (east coast of Australia time) at the London Book Fair, and includes these six titles: Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from Catalan by Julia Sanches … | Continue reading
Paper, or physical, books are by no means relics of a bygone era, if sales thereof in the UK last year are anything to go by. Six hundred and sixty nine million books were purchased in 2022. Against a population of sixty seven million people, that equates to about ten books per p … | Continue reading
It’s not being remade, but it is being re-released. Whether you’re ready or not. The Big Lebowski, trailer, the slapstick comedy crime caper by American filmmaking auteurs, Joel and Ethan Coen, is having a special theatrical re-run in some parts of the world this week. The move m … | Continue reading
The Age Book of the Year awards 2023 shortlists were announced this afternoon. The awards are split into two sections, one for fiction, and the other for non-fiction. The shortlisted titles for the fiction award are: Limberlost by Robbie Arnott Every Version of You by Grace Chan … | Continue reading
Brisbane based Australian photographer Glenn Homann has been named the 2022 Grand Prize winner in the twelfth annual Mobile Photography Awards, with a portrait titled “Old Mate”. Glenn Homann’s mobile photography is remarkable on so many levels. He takes us with him through a bro … | Continue reading
The Harry Potter stories are being rebooted — already — this time in the form of a television series, that will play out over a decade, says an announcement from producers of the show, Warner Bros Discovery: “The series will feature a new cast to lead a new generation of fandom, … | Continue reading
Katherine Day writing for The Conversation: “The entire industry is based on hunches,” says literary agent Martin Shaw, who was head book buyer at Readings for 20 years before he became an agent. “More than half the books you publish either lose money or don’t make money. And tha … | Continue reading
The latest feature from Kurzgesagt, those veritable video virtuosos of educational storytelling, explores the possibility of Earth being invaded by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilisation. While Kurzgesagt stresses much of what they present here is speculative, some of the poi … | Continue reading
It’s been a while since I wrote about recent fiction releases by Australian authors, so here’s a quick round up of a few titles that have arrived on bookshop shelves in the last little while. The Last Love Note, by Emma Grey, an author living near Canberra, is the story of a woma … | Continue reading
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by American author Taylor Jenkins Reid, has taken out the number one spot in the 2023 Dymocks Top 101 book poll. Another title I’ve also read, The Dictionary of Lost Words, by South Australian based writer Pip Williams, was voted into the number … | Continue reading
Beau Is Afraid, trailer, is the latest feature by American screenwriter and filmmaker Ari Aster. If there were only one word to sum up Aster’s work, uncomfortable would surely be it. His 2018 debut, Heredity, a supernatural thriller, about a family whose members become possessed … | Continue reading
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy announced three new Star Wars movies at Star Wars Celebration, currently taking place in London. One of the titles will see Daisy Ridley reprise the role of Rey, who featured prominently in episodes seven to nine, in a story that picks up fift … | Continue reading
Online bookseller Book Depository says it will shut up shop in late April 2023. Established in the United Kingdom in 2004 by Stuart Felton, and Andrew Crawford — a former Amazon employee — the company went on to be bought by Amazon in 2011. The news comes as a blow to book buyers … | Continue reading
The Sydney Film Festival, now its seventieth year, has announced the first twelve films that will be part of the 2023 program. Afire, trailer, by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, who made the brilliant Barbara in 2012, caught my eye immediately with its storyline, that among o … | Continue reading
Entries are open until Monday 29 May 2023 for the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Award. With a prize of twenty-thousand dollars, it is Australia’s richest award for original, unpublished, poetry of up to one-hundred lines in length. David Tribe was an Australian humanist and writ … | Continue reading
By some estimates, one hundred and twenty three thousand new songs are released across the globe every day. That’s surely more music than any person could listen to in a lifetime. In a seemingly arts saturated world though, American jazz critic and music historian, Ted Gioia, con … | Continue reading
Trove, Australia’s online library database of historical and cultural documents, which is operated by the National Library of Australia, has received a new round of funding from the Australian federal government. The move ends months of uncertainty that had been shrouding Trove’s … | Continue reading
After an asteroid buzzed uncomfortably close to Earth several days ago, the trailer for American filmmaker Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, landed, if you’ll excuse the pun. Does this mean Anderson is psychic, or does he have a knack for — if you’ll excuse another pun — hi … | Continue reading
After a public vote to select a name for the Booker Prize trophy, convenors of British literary award have revealed Iris to be the winning choice. Interestingly though, the winner of the vote was actually the name Bernie, being a nod to Bernardine Evaristo, the first black woman … | Continue reading
Melbourne based Australian musician and author Edwina Preston took her manuscript for Bad Art Mother, which was today shortlisted for the 2023 Stella Prize, to twenty-six book publishers before finding one who accepted it: Thankfully her agent, Jenny Darling, was sending out the … | Continue reading
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