Rachel Morley

‘I’m always writing – even if only in my head. I take notes on paper – often backs of envelopes and other scraps, I confess. But yes, I am always writing. It’s what defines me. If I need defining, what I am is a writer. That’s what I do.’ Rachel Morley speaks with Carmel Bird about her long career as a writer.

‘It’s that wonderful mediating effect of writing, its ability to hold things clear that I’ve always been drawn to, and which is very similar to the way in which hunger works.’ Rachel Morley interviews poet, critic, editor and essayist Fiona Wright for the SRB.

The full text of Go Set a Watchman was finally released on Tuesday 14 July, the same day that the first close-up images of Pluto were beamed back to earth, and in many ways this seems fitting given the once improbable likelihood of either event ever happening. Pluto is 7.5 billion kilometres from Earth.

For centuries, pirates have captured the imaginations of both children and adults. The swashbuckling adventures of Long John Silver, Calico Jack and Captain Hook have won legions of fans, who dream of their dashing adventures across the high seas. We can now add Pen Davenport, the protagonist of Matthew Pearl’s latest novel The Last Bookaneer (2015), to the list of notorious pirates. Unlike his predecessors, however, Davenport’s interests lie not in piracy at sea, but in an illicit trade known as ‘bookaneering’ – flogging stolen copies of novels and other creative works to punters keen for a bargain.

Two remarkable things happened this week that cannot pass without mention. The Liberal Party proved to the Australian people that it wasn’t at all like the supposedly ‘dysfunctional’ Labor Party by behaving uncannily like the Labor Party, and one of the world’s worst best-selling novels, Fifty Shades of Grey, turned a nightmare into reality by showing up in Australian cinemas daring to call itself a movie. For what it’s worth, the Prime Minister Tony Abbott has read Fifty Shades of Grey.

A second novel by Harper Lee. It was the one we couldn’t have predicted last Friday when we published our list of upcoming 2015 releases. But that was the news that came out of the US on Tuesday when Harper Collins announced it was publishing Go Set a Watchman, a novel written by Lee in the mid-1950s, but shelved on the advice of a publisher, and then later presumed lost.

As the first issue of the Sydney Review of Books for 2015 has been taking shape, we have been contemplating the coming year in publishing. Given the recent speculation about titles and leaders at the national level we think it’s only fitting that we begin the year by nominating our ‘captain’s picks’ for 2015 — a list that reads like a roll call of contemporary literature’s knights and dames.

Tonight marks the end of state-based television current affairs on the ABC, with all eight Friday night 7.30 programs preparing to air their final episodes. The state editions, which for more than two decades have covered local politics, arts, sport and cultural issues that would otherwise miss out on coverage beyond the local papers, have been axed as part of the much-discussed (and criticised) federal government cuts to the ABC.

It is something of an understatement to say that Serial has become a cultural phenomenon. The statistics are widely quoted – each episode averages 1.5 million listeners. It is both the number one and the fastest downloaded podcast in the history of iTunes. The show has inspired countless opinion pieces, interviews, analyses, memes, google hangouts with program ‘characters’, and even a parody. There are dedicated discussion outlets. Slate has its own weekly Serial forum, podcast and aggregated feature story site, for example; while Reddit, in typical fashion, has taken its obsession to another level, with its devoted citizen-sleuth pages.

There was a moment during the speech Cate Blanchett delivered at Gough Whitlam’s memorial service on Wednesday when the headlines got up and wrote themselves. It took 51 seconds and began with the following eight words: ‘I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education.’ While the majority of the crowd showed their support for the actor’s agenda with a thunderous seventeen-second round of applause, a small coterie of others set their faces to a stony neutrality.

In his excellent book The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, UK scholar Andrew McGettigan gives one of the best analyses of market-driven approaches to university reform that I have seen. McGettigan shows how education has moved from being a public good to an ‘individual financial investment’, one that – in the end – will not only be detrimental to economic interests but also to students, society and democracy at large.

Last night, Australian time, the Swedish Academy of Literature announced that the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature was Patrick Modiano. The Nobel Academy awarded the French novelist – the eleventh writer from France to win the eight million kroner ($1.26 million) prize – for his mastery of ‘the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’.

Last week, I was given a copy of Marja Mills’ memoir The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee (2014). So far I haven’t been able to read it. The problem is not the quality of the prose – I haven’t ventured into that yet – it is connected to the controversy surrounding the book. Mills has become embroiled in a serious dispute with Harper Lee.

Next week, on Tuesday 23 September, Stefan Collini will be giving a public lecture at Sydney University entitled ‘What’s Happening to Universities? Historical and Comparative Perspectives’. Collini has been an outspoken and trenchant critic of the deregulation of the university system in the United Kingdom, and his lecture is sure to be relevant to the present situation in Australia.

This week readers, students, colleagues and friends are mourning the death of Martin Harrison, who was widely regarded as one of the country’s finest poets, essayists and teachers. Harrison died of a heart attack on Saturday 6 September. He was 65 years old.

At the Araluen Arts Centre, Aboriginal artists are now converging (at the time of publication) for the twenty-fifth Desert Mob Symposium to discuss arts practices, projects and the experience of working within Aboriginal-owned arts centres. The symposium, which is driven by Desart, is one of the vital arts initiatives for Aboriginal artists in this country. Artists speak directly about their work, practices and cultural practices, as well as the joys and challenges that come with being an arts practitioner in remote Australia. This year, the theme of the symposium is ‘reflection and projection’ and it will be worth following the conversations that emerge.

2014 has been something of a watershed year for books on Australian politics. Of course, this is hardly surprising. The soap opera of the Gillard and Rudd years will probably exercise politicians, analysts and biographers for years to come. But we are currently facing something of an armada – to steal a phrase from the popular media – of political memoirs and biographies.

In the opening chapter of her biographical study of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee recalls her subject’s troubled relationship with the literary form. ‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, lamenting the difficulty of writing the life of Roger Fry: ‘How can one deal with facts – so many and so many and so many. Or ought one, as I incline, to be purely fictitious? And what is a life? And what was Roger?’ Some 60 years later, Lee found herself facing similar questions. How should she deal with a life so voluminously documented?

There are countless stories on the web about the innovative (and contentious) measures that librarians and other bibliophiles are taking to ensure libraries and book culture remain relevant. Fundamental to the modern library these days are built-in cafes, access to wifi, iPads, virtual librarians, lounging furniture, Xboxes and even a whole new code of manners that has sent the old-fashioned ‘shhh’ into decline.

Eimear McBride has won another award for A Girl is a Half-formed Thing: the £10 000 (A$18 350) Desmond Elliott Prize. Reflecting on McBride’s achievement, author and judging chair, Chris Cleave, lauded the author and her novel with the kind of praise that would leave most writers breathless.

What a week it has been for Evie Wyld! After winning the Encore Award and the Jerwood Fiction Prize eight days ago, the British-Australian novelist, who for some years called Australia home, has now taken out this country’s most prestigious literary award. Wyld was presented with the 2014 Miles Franklin Award last night for her second novel All the Birds, Singing at a glamorous ceremony on the top floor of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Speaking on behalf of the 2014 Miles Franklin judging panel, Richard Neville, the State Library of NSW Mitchell Librarian, called the writing in Wyld’s winning entry ‘spare, yet pitch perfect’.

A big congratulations to Evie Wyld who’s had a winsome few days in England with her novel All the Birds, Singing. Within the space of 24 hours, Wyld picked up the £10 000 Encore Award and the £5 000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize , an accolade she’ll share with seven other writers. The Jerwood honours the best British writing of the year while the Encore Award celebrates second novels. Wyld notably beat Man Booker prize-winner Elanor Catton for the Encore Award.

These days, digital publishing is a given talking point at writers’ festivals and literary conferences. After years of debate between publishers, writers, critics and readers over the question of whether print publishing could survive the digital age, it seems the industry has largely accepted – for now at least – that both forms have a place in the literary culture and, furthermore, that both have the potential to be profitable.

This week, on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a highly personal essay by Yiwu – now a dissident writer living in Germany – was published on internet sites around the world, including PEN America. ‘The Tanks and the People’ details the devastating impact of political oppression in China. Included in the essay is a particularly harrowing English translation of Yiwu’s 1989 poem.

The power and the contribution of Maya Angelou to contemporary social and political life came full circle this week with the news that the writer had died in her North Carolina home on 28 May, aged 86. Since her death, the reach of Angelou’s work as a poet, autobiographer, performer, activist and scholar has been startlingly apparent. Thousands – perhaps millions – of readers, writers, artists, activists and commentators world-wide have gathered online to express not only sadness at her passing, but also gratitude for the way she tackled critical social justice issues such as race, class and gender discrimination, sexual violence, and the importance of preserving and respecting diversity within cultures.

Australia has enjoyed a range of literary happenings this week, with festivals, awards, and even the unmasking of a pseudonymous reviewer making headlines across mainstream and independent media. Here is the week in review.

It is with some delight then that we launch our newly expanded newsletter. With over 2000 subscribers and more than 14000 unique visitors to our website every month, we thought it was time to widen the conversation about literary culture. Our new format will continue to alert you to the essays and reviews we are publishing, but we are also making space for a weekly round-up of literary news and events.