The awards span six categories fiction, non-fiction, young adult literature, children’s literature, poetry, and Australian history, with prizes of up to one hundred thousand dollars awarded per category. Entries are open to citizens or permanent residents of Australia, for titles … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Pexels. Should mobile phones be banned at music festivals? What sort of question is that? After all, is not recording the happenings of the day, be it video clips, or photos, and sharing them online, part and parcel of the music festival experience? Well it is, … | Continue reading
American filmmaker Chad Stahelski, possibly best known for directing the John Wick films, starring Keanu Reeves, believes an Oscar Award for movie stunts is forthcoming. While promoting the latest instalment of the franchise, John Wick: Chapter 4, earlier this year, Stahelski, a … | Continue reading
Housing shortages, along with rising interest rates and mortgage repayments, are presently driving up rents and homelessness. To alleviate the problem, the supply of affordable accommodation needs to be increased. But planning and constructing safe, well-built dwellings, takes ti … | Continue reading
There are a million self-help books in the world, all filled to the brim with suggestions and methods to somehow make your life easier, better, or happier. But if you’re looking for the type of self-help these titles offer, which one — of the multitudes — do you choose? Chris Tay … | Continue reading
Kurzgesagt take on the difficult questions, and come back with easy to follow, and entertaining, answers. Some forms of cancer have proved seemingly impossible to treat, but the German animation studio feels confident that will change in the not too distant future. Let’s hope so. … | Continue reading
Strewth, it’s been one hundred years since Australia’s favourite yeast extract, Vegemite, hit the shelves of grocery shops. Although similar (sort of…) to Marmite, which came along in 1902, Vegemite was developed by Cyril Callister, a Melbourne chemist and food technologist in 19 … | Continue reading
For decades until the 1970’s, some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families by successive Australian governments. These children became known as the Stolen Generations. Indigenous woman Brenda Matthews was taken from her family aged … | Continue reading
Australians will be participating in a referendum sometime in the next six months to decide whether a change should be made to the constitution, to create an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Such a Voice would take the form of an independent body made up of Indigenous … | Continue reading
Book cover of The Lovers, by Yumna Kassab, named on the 2023 Miles Franklin shortlist. The shortlist of the 2023 Miles Franklin literary award was announced this morning. The following six books have advanced to the next stage of the prestigious Australian literary award: Chai Ti … | Continue reading
Debbie Disrupt, AI newsreader, image via Disrupt Radio. Entrepreneurial thinkers and business mavericks are in the sights of Disrupt Radio, Australia’s newest national radio network, which goes to air, or a streaming device near you, on Monday 26 June 2023. Australian comedian an … | Continue reading
The winners of the 2023 BookPeople Awards were announced last night, Sunday 18 June, at a ceremony at the Adelaide Convention Centre, in South Australia. The awards recognise both the efforts of booksellers across Australia, and Australian writers of adult fiction, adult non-fict … | Continue reading
Gayamaygal/Manly, Sydney, based Australian writer and editor Lauren Crozier has been named winner of the 2023 Text Prize, with her manuscript titled The Best Witch in Paris, which will be published in 2024 as part of the prize. Crozier’s novel is a middle-grade adventure, being s … | Continue reading
The Recording Academy of the United States recently amended their rules to stipulate that only human artists and creators can receive Grammy awards. Speaking in a recent interview, Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said AI musical compositions can be entered for con … | Continue reading
Meanjin/Brisbane based actor and screenwriter Anna McGahan has been named winner of the 2023 The Australian/Vogel’s Award for Young Writers, with her novel Immaculate, which is set to be published on Tuesday 20 June 2023: All Frances wants is a cure for her daughter, but that wou … | Continue reading
On the subject of self-publishing, retired Australian horticulturist journalist and foreign aid researcher Helen Moody recently published her own book, South Coast Islands NSW. While Moody’s title is selling well, six-hundred copies from a print run of seven-hundred have sold, Mo … | Continue reading
A fascinating overview of the book publishing industry in Australia, and probably globally, by Dave Gow, who recently went through the process of self-publishing a book: Traditional book publishers are essentially operating like startup investors or venture capitalists. They make … | Continue reading
Australian freelance writer and creative copywriter Michelle See-Tho has been named winner of 2023 Penguin Literary Prize, for her manuscript titled Jade and Emerald. See-Tho’s yet to be published novel tells the story of an acquaintance a lonely ten year girl develops with a wel … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Pexels. With emphasis on the word little. Recent comments made by Sir Paul McCartney, bass player and co-songwriter of defunct 1960s British music act the Beatles, that AI has brought about a “new” song by the band, are perhaps a tad misconstrued. AI technology … | Continue reading
American author Cormac McCarthy, writer of novels including No Country for Old Men in 2005, The Road in 2006, and more recently in 2022, The Passenger and Stella Maris, died on Tuesday 13 June 2023. According to a statement on his website, he died of natural causes. So long Corma … | Continue reading
Design magazine Wallpaper* has published a selection of photos taken during the production of the new Wes Anderson film, Asteroid City. Anderson worked with his long-time collaborator, production designer Adam Stockhausen, to create the trademark “Andersonesque” sets of Asteroid … | Continue reading
The Literature Map charts the literary connection between writers. The closer writers are in literary style, the more likely a reader will have read the work of other authors in a writer’s “neighbourhood”. For instance, literary neighbours of Irish author Sally Rooney include Mar … | Continue reading
Applications are open until Monday 26 June 2023 for the inaugural Australian LUMIX seventy-two hour filmmaking challenge. To be in the running, aspiring entrants need to submit a film clip of thirty to sixty seconds duration. From there, ten selected filmmakers will be invited to … | Continue reading
Virtual community Second Life turns twenty this month, and continues to deliver what it always promised: a second life that’s sometimes better than the first: While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a … | Continue reading
Bad waitress, an essay by American writer Becca Schuh. Juggling the day job with writing ambitions, we’ve all been there, or maybe, are still there. This is reading for writers in either situation. Waitressing funded my rent and bills and food and clothes so I could spend the tim … | Continue reading
Quasars, are the single most powerful objects in existence, and are the subject of the latest video from Kurzgesagt. Thankfully, the nearest known such object is about six-hundred million light years away from Earth. As small as a grain of sand compared to the Amazon River, they … | Continue reading
Still from Don’t Worry, I’m Fine, directed by Philippe Lioret. Nineteen year old Lili (Mélanie Laurent), has returned to her parents place in Paris, France, after spending a year in Spain. She is alarmed to learn Loïc, her musician twin brother, stormed out of the family home day … | Continue reading
Still from Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson. Asteroid City, the latest feature by American filmmaker Wes Anderson, premiered in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival on the evening of Thursday 8 June 2023. While there was much excitement in the lead up to the release of An … | Continue reading
A few days ago Apple unveiled its much anticipated spatial computer headset device, Vision Pro. According to Apple, the product is “a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected … | Continue reading
At the age of ninety, British actor Michael Caine has turned his hand to novel writing. His debut title, Deadly Game — set to be published in Australia by Hachette on Tuesday 28 November 2023 — quite possibly draws a certain amount of inspiration from some of Caine’s acting roles … | Continue reading
Montreal based Canadian software developer, and blogger, Julia Evans, dispels some of the blogging myths she believes are putting off people who are considering starting their own blogs. For instance, the myth that more material is always better — in other words, blog posts must … | Continue reading
In ten years’ time Vietnamese born American author Ocean Vuong may not be a writer anymore. For all anyone knows, including possibly Vuong himself, he might be a software engineer by then. Speaking to British journalist, and writer for The Guardian, Kadish Morris, Vuong says he m … | Continue reading
Every year the Next Chapter helps four emerging, unpublished, Australian writers bring their stories to a wider audience, through financial support and mentoring. Writers chosen to participate receive fifteen thousand dollars, and are given assistance to get their work published. … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Pete Linforth. Warning: spoilers ahead. Return to this article once you’ve finished reading the novel. Every Version of You, published by Affirm Press in 2022, is the debut novel of Melbourne based Australian author Grace Chan. Set in the late twenty-first centu … | Continue reading
Australian science fiction writer T. R. Napper was named winner of the Best Science Fiction Novel award, with 36 Streets, in the 2022 Aurealis Awards, at a ceremony in Canberra, last night. The novel, Napper’s debut, is set in a futuristic version of Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam … | Continue reading
The Australian premiere of the latest Wes Anderson feature, Asteroid City, takes place in less than a week on Thursday 8 June 2023, at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival. If you need a little something to keep you occupied between now and then though, help contain the excitement and a … | Continue reading
The Australian Book Design Awards (ABDA) not only judge books by their covers, they celebrate them, and last week the winners of the 2023 awards were announced. Son of Sin written by Omar Sakr, pictured above, won the Best Designed Literary Fiction/Poetry Cover award, with a cove … | Continue reading
My thanks to Phil Gyford for listing disassociated in his web directory ooh.directory. In the early days of the web, before search engines were a thing, website owners often sought to be added to web directories, as promotional opportunities were otherwise limited. These website … | Continue reading
When I re-launched disassociated as a blog in 2007, being one of many reboots this website has been subject to since 1997, I migrated to blog publishing application WordPress (WP). Prior to that, all pages here were laboriously hand coded. Hand coding was a hangover from my web d … | Continue reading
There’s a lot to like about smaller, independent, book publishers. The first has to be the quality of the stories they’ve been bringing to bookshelves in recent years. This is borne out by the increasing presence of indie published titles in the long and short lists of Australian … | Continue reading
Being a social media influencer isn’t all sunshine and double shot half decaf blonde espresso cappuccinos with caramel drizzle. There’s a dark, and dangerous, side to this occupation. That you should have learned after seeing Sissy, a horror/thriller made in early 2022 by Austral … | Continue reading
German author Katja Oskamp has won the 2023 Dublin Literary Award with her 2019 book Marzahn, Mon Amour. The Dublin Literary Award is an international literary award that has been recognising excellence in global literature since 1994. Books written in, or translated into, Englis … | Continue reading
Horse, by United States based Australian author Geraldine Brooks, has been named winner of the 2023 Literary Fiction Book of the Year, at the ABIA awards this evening. Horse is a story that spans centuries, and explores the connection unrelated people share in a race horse: Kentu … | Continue reading
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, book cover. Georgi Gospodinov, described as the most translated and internationally awarded Bulgarian writer after 1989, has won the 2023 International Booker Prize, for his 2022 novel Time Shelter. Translated by American literary translator Ang … | Continue reading
We Come With This Place, written by Gudanji and Wakaja woman Debra Dank, was named Book of the Year in the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards this evening in Sydney. We Come with This Place is a remarkable book, as rich, varied and surprising as the vast landscape in which it is … | Continue reading
The Book Thief, the 2005 novel by Sydney based Australian author Markus Zusak, is Australia’s entry in the inaugural Eurovision book contest. Yes, you read that right. The Eurovision book contest, which is an initiative of the annual Hay Festival, a literary festival held in Hay- … | Continue reading
Short-form video hosting service TikTok certainly has its nay-sayers. Security analysts believe the app may be compromising the privacy of users, while lawmakers in some countries are considering banning it. But the news isn’t all bad: TikTok appears to be behind a recent surge i … | Continue reading
A recent poll of just over two hundred Australian Society of Authors (ASA) members reveals local authors and illustrators are concerned generative AI technologies pose a threat to their livelihoods. This despite about twenty percent of poll participants stating they made use of A … | Continue reading