Some late news to hand, Jarad Bruinstroop has been named winner of the 2023 Val Vallis Award for unpublished Australian poetry, with a poem titled Fragments on the Myth of Cy Twombly. Bruinstroop’s debut collection of poetry, Reliefs, is due to be published by the University of Q … | Continue reading
The Wife and the Widow by Christian White, and The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, are among Australian titles I’ve read that make the 2023 Better Reading Top 100 list. Other books by authors outside of Australia I’ve finished, include Normal People by Sally Rooney, and … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of SanderSmit. I was pleased to see the back of my (admittedly modest) collection of vinyl records a decade or two ago. I was not a fan of the format. The records (and their covers) needed to be handled with great care, the vinyl seemed to scratch all too easily, a … | Continue reading
Here’s a coincidence, just days after I saw Taxi, also known as Tehran Taxi, a film made in 2015 by Jafar Panahi, news comes through that a travel ban placed on the Iranian filmmaker fourteen years ago has been lifted. His travel ban was first imposed in 2009, after his attendanc … | Continue reading
Earlier this year we saw what might have happened had Star Wars creator George Lucas made 2001: A Space Odyssey. But instead of asking what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick made a Star Wars film, what about imagining Wes Anderson doing so instead? Well, imagine no more. So … | Continue reading
America is the land of hope and glory. According to legend, it’s the place to make a new start in life. And, more importantly perhaps, is also home to Disneyworld. The prospect of visiting the entertainment complex is an enticement Lucia (Martha Reyes Arias) has offered her young … | Continue reading
It’s been a good couple of years for poetry at the Stella Prize. And for the University of Queensland Press (UQP). This evening Queensland born Australian author Sarah Holland-Batt was named winner of the 2023 award, with her collection of poetry, The Jaguar, published by UQP, in … | Continue reading
Cairns, Queensland, based Australian artist Andrea Huelin, has been named winner of the 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize, with her portrait of New Zealand comedian Cal Wilson, titled Clown Jewels. In addition, fifty-seven works were selected as finalists for the 2023 Archibald P … | Continue reading
The American Library Association (ALA) has published a list of the top ten books subject to some sort of challenge, based on their content, or subject matter, in the last twelve months. While the majority of challenges related to books written by, or about, people of colour, and … | Continue reading
A recent survey conducted by British book industry magazine The Bookseller, found a little over half of first time authors did not finding the publishing experience positive: Among the majority who said they had a negative experience of debut publication, anxiety, stress, depress … | Continue reading
Jenny Brown Associates, a literary agency based in Edinburgh, Scotland, announced the launch of a literary prize for emerging authors aged fifty and over, the Debut Writers Over 50 award, at this year’s London Book Fair. Speaking at the event, which was held last week, agency ass … | Continue reading
Image courtesy of Enrique Meseguer. Too Long; Didn’t Read: Glitchcore is a type of electronic music that features noisy digital artefacts including distortion, static, crackle, interference, and other warning sounds that means something’s not right. But there’s nothing wrong with … | Continue reading
It’s been a busy several days for literary awards. Since last Friday, shortlists for The Age Book of the Year, the International Booker Prize, and the Australian Book Industry Awards, have been published. And to cap off the week, the 2023 BookPeople Book of Year shortlist was ann … | Continue reading
A sleepover in a bookshop, especially one that is reputed to be haunted, sounds like a fun way for bookworms to spend the night. That’s what happened recently at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, when the bookshop made fourteen sleepover spots available every night for two weeks … | Continue reading
Libraries are more than somewhere to go to merely read, or borrow, a book. They’re often places were people study, work, and, to a degree, socialise. In short, libraries are community hubs. But the idea that libraries could be expanded upon — subject to certain caveats — to offer … | Continue reading
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