Australian writers

In Luke Carman’s 2013 debut, An Elegant Young Man, the Kerouac-revering narrator from Western Sydney had his wayward literary influences corrected…

Why has it taken me so long to write this review of The Most Important Job in the World? Whenever I…

In Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, tiny comets blaze across the pages. Connecting disparate histories, their orbits disrupt the order of…

Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled…

In both books, the aspiration – to be the Asian actor who makes it big – is quickly diminished by the reality. It’s another version of the model minority myth, where even if you win, there’s an element of losing.

‘Stories of Aboriginal heroism (like that of Yarri and Jacky Jacky) are not new. In fact, our oldest stories tell of characters of high esteem, knowledge, and courage.’

In the wake of the loss of Australian poet Jordie Albiston on the last day of February of this year, I have been reflecting on the profound influence her work had on my reading, writing and appreciation of poetry since I first read excerpts of her work in an undergraduate course reader.

With so much material available for an author who remains a notable figure in Australian literature, what is the task of a biography of Prichard today?

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or appalling behaviour so often shapes their life trajectories.

A biographer is tasked, after all, with interpreting a life, yet Mears deliberately did so much of this interpretation, and re-interpretation, herself. And she did so with an increasing knowledge, it seems, that her own interpretations were partial and fallible and liable to change shape over time.