Publishing
On novelists and poets
The prejudice against poetry goes deep, and it isn’t simply a matter of it being ‘difficult to read’. I have often heard this criticism levelled at literary novels too – ‘it’s difficult to read’. What actually rises before me at this moment is the phrase, ‘the market says no’, delivered in the same self-righteous whine that David Walliams uses in Little Britain to defer to the authority of his computer. But deeper than the sense that the poets are trying to put one over their readers is the assumption that they are bludgers as well as con artists, and therefore have no right to be in the marketplace at all.
On The Stella Prize
If I were a novelist longlisted, or shortlisted, for the Stella Prize, and I lost out to a historian, I would wonder at the criteria that had been at work in deciding the award. If I were a historian and I lost to a novelist, I think my hackles would be raised at the possible implication that the imaginative penetration of the writer of fiction was once again being placed above the interpretive powers of the historian.
An Open Letter to the Australian Government on the Future of Arts Funding
The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that in 2008–9, the arts contributed $86 billion to the Australian GDP – that is, 7% – $13 billion of which flowed directly from our field, literature and print media. It is worth noting that the mining sector only provides $121 billion to the GDP, and employs fewer workers (187 400 directly, 599 680 indirectly), yet receives far more government financial support at federal and state levels.
‘I have had my vision’
The more I go on, the more I am convinced that a great book is one which leads its readers away from the worn path of what they already know, to a wild and unfamiliar place where new logics and understandings can take hold. But of course there is nothing new in this – it is what any gifted editor has always known: that each book is its own wild creature, and that sometimes it is in disorder and inconsistency and ambiguity where the greatest art lies.
Nimble innovators
The recent sprouting of literary journals in Australia is proof of the scene’s fecundity. The past five years have witnessed the birth of Kill Your Darlings, Archer, Contrappasso, Higher Arc, Cuttings, Tincture, The Canary Press, Stilts, The Review of Australian Fiction, Ampersand and Seizure. There are others – this is not an exhaustive list.
Lives of the Publishers
In his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, Roberto Bolaño is clear-sighted enough to know that a visionary writer amounts to little without a visionary publisher. What would Benno von Archimboldi, the ‘great black shark’ of world literature, have been without Jacob Bubis, the German publisher unconditionally committed to him?
Parallel fates
It is conventional wisdom in the publishing business that newspaper reviews, even negative ones, can help to sell books. But while book publishers are beset by structural changes to their industry … the newspaper business is suffering an even more painful struggle, to evolve or die.