Non-fiction

The Winter Road, in charting a long and complex case that extends over years, with numerous participants with conflicting agendas and personalities, signals her development as a writer. 

I don’t think good queer memoir needs to have a didactic relationship to ideological representation. But there is, here, a more sophisticated understanding of representation than we’ve seen in Australian memoir recently. It can be important and necessary to build your identity using what you see around you, but this work is collaborative rather than transactional or instructional.

What could be more humiliating than to write and be read, to be thought about and perceived by strangers?

I can’t stop thinking about People Who Lunch. The book interrupts my sleep and I desperately want to discuss it with everybody. I loved it even as I was aware of the ways that it frustrated me.

The ABC may not anymore be in the immediate peril that the BBC is, but the danger remains broadly the same. If we want to save the ABC from that danger, then taking it for granted will no longer be an option.

The Highsmith of Diaries and Notebooks is not someone with a problem that needs to be fixed. It is someone who, gloriously, messily, looked around a nasty world filled with awful people, and saw nothing too fix, and felt no desire to change it.

‘One surprisingly persistent theme in Making Australian History is the historical significance of literature, and in particular poetry. Can a poem ‘know’ something, ‘think’ something that history cannot?’

Take any one instance of Day’s work, any single essay, and for the sake of comparison you’d struggle to find a writer as impassioned by words, by diction and syntax, and as agog with wonder at natural phenomena at every scale beyond the human.

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?

Summertime makes plain what we ought not need to be told: we are already living in the dreaded future, and that this dreaded future already forms part of our past.