Peter Craven

Peter Craven is a prolific Melbourne-based reviewer, literary critic, columnist and essayist. He was the founding editor of the Black Inc. Best Australian annuals (Essays, Stories, Poems) and the Quarterly Essay. His work appears regularly in the Age, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He won the 2004 Pascall Prize for Critical Writing.

Works By Peter Craven

Old Master, Old Monster: The Bughouse by Daniel Swift
The trouble is that The Bughouse is constantly outgrowing its own status as a work of interpretation without quite turning into the thing it might be – a biography which is also a work of intrinsic literary quality. What we tend to get is a kind o...
23 Aug. 2017
One Hand Behind His Back: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
'It doesn’t take long to realise that in The Noise of Time we’re not only in Russia, the fabled disnatured Russia of the Soviet and Stalinist dispensation, but in some gulag of the mind, some imprisoning sterility of the spirit. It takes a little
24 May. 2016
The Greatest Churchman: Mannix by Brenda Niall
Daniel Mannix is the greatest churchman in Australian history, but he was far too much of a turbulent priest for the College of Cardinals. This was the man who opposed Billy Hughes’ referendum on conscription and won. This is the man who split the...
31 July. 2015
Invisible giants: Making Make-Believe Real by Garry Wills
Garry Wills is a great American political essayist and historian whose imagination has always been set on fire by the power of the word in the time of Elizabeth I. In his new book, he writes about it at length. And it is an extraordinary thing to
13 Mar. 2015
Orchestrated tusheries: The Young Lion by Blanche d’Alpuget
It seems, on the face of it, a bit bizarre that Blanche d’Alpuget should have written what is clearly the first of a series of novels about Henry II, and a bit odd too that she should have called it The Young Lion.
11 Feb. 2014
Cast as a spy: A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
So there is a sense in which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an instant classic, like Psycho or A Streetcar Named Desire. How does it stand up? ...more than anything le Carré had so far written, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a work of...
11 Oct. 2013
Avuncular question marks: The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee
Now, we have a new novel with the bizarre title (for Coetzee anyway) of The Childhood of Jesus. It comes with a cover of a young child in sunglasses and dress-up cloak and is like nothing on earth, and not much else in the history of literature.
21 Mar. 2013

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Peter Craven

Works By Peter Craven

Old Master, Old Monster: The Bughouse by Daniel Swift

One Hand Behind His Back: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

The Greatest Churchman: Mannix by Brenda Niall

Invisible giants: Making Make-Believe Real by Garry Wills

Orchestrated tusheries: The Young Lion by Blanche d’Alpuget

Cast as a spy: A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

Avuncular question marks: The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee