Who knows what lies ahead for Hong Kong? Its literature shows what did unfold and, collected and translated here under John Minford’s expert guidance, lets us share in what Hong Kong people care so much about.

In a quietly melancholy way, Bewilderment is a politically defeated novel, and perhaps in a deeper sense defeatist.

After being cooped up for so long, and after enduring all the grief that comes with life, with none of…

It is not difficult to read how the Australian publishing industry, a cog in the wheel of the colonial nation…

Building on and breaking from more than a decade of writing, Lahiri’s Whereabouts (2021) is the product of a becoming which refracts life through the medium of a new linguistic lens.

‘Coiled loops of time.’ (Tim, part two of an undated letter, possibly begun before xmas 2019, part three finished 4…

We have been aware for centuries that we are responsible for the earth’s denudation: its ‘cold staring spaces’, as English…

I didn’t necessarily like school but I understood what it wanted from me. My year level had 330 students, yet I managed to graduate as dux and received an equity scholarship at the University of Queensland which quite literally changed the material conditions of my life. I didn’t like telling people at university where I went to school or that I came from a single parent family that lived on welfare. I didn’t understand how some students talked so easily with lecturers. Class preparation was googling how to pronounce things like ‘Michel Foucault’. But this was water to tread, for the moral was that you never complained. It would be ungrateful.

Many were surprised when the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. But Abdulrazak Gurnah is an inspired choice. Each of his ten novels offer terrific rewards to readers. Though scandalously unsung till now, he is a superb crafter of narrative and a transporting storyteller. He is also a writer of worlds we sorely need today.

Thursday 2 December, 4pm
Join us on zoom to mark the end of the SRB 2021 Program with readings by Timmah Ball, Miro Bilbrough, Elizabeth Bryer and Huyen Hac Helen Tran .

Launched in October 2021, The Circular is a weekly newsletter from the SRB that keeps the best new Australian non-fiction in circulation; essays, interviews, reviews, features and more. Each week we dispatch a newsletter highlighting interesting, useful and surprising non-fiction published by and about Australian writers.

Maybe you already know that working minimally feels feasible when there is work, when you have, or can return to, a paid job, when you are fairly confident that, frightening though the thought might be, if you lost your paid job you could find another.

Every technology offers gain and loss. This is my accounting, a personal arithmetic of screens and apps engaged with over one, exceptional year.

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.