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In a staggering volte face, the judges have awarded a first time author (although has written a play) and someone who didn’t spend $40,000 on HECS fees on a creative writing course, Australian Book of the Year. Finding herself stuck at home without a job during lockdown, Diana Reid, 26, wrote a book in five…

OK, I’ve been hammering Australian writers for their blinkered subject matter for a while now. I make no secret that the biggest influences on my writing are American writers. Some old and some new. I’ve included a few below: Anything by Lucia Berlin, Ursula K. Le Gunn (espc ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’),…

With monotonous regularity, sections of the Australian media ‘rebirths’ a dead singer from an alternative Australian band, due to his or her ‘cult’ status. Think of The Saints (the recent death of Chris Bailey) and The Go Betweens (Grant McLennan). There’s talk of the cultish uniqueness of the lead singer or guitarist (rarely the drummer,…

Farrah Tomazin in The Sydney Morning Age has written a cracking expose on banning books. It’s a broadside at hardline Christians in the USA. They’ve been doing this since ‘The Origin of the Species’ came out but it’s worth a story. Ms Tomazin failed to mention the role Cancel Culture has played in banning books…

Author Joan Didion, whose essays, memoirs, novels and screenplays chronicled contemporary American life, has died at the age of 87 from complications from Parkinson’s disease. “Didion was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her best-selling works of fiction, commentary, and memoir … are considered modern classics,” Penguin Random House said in…

This review by Vanessa Francesca in The Age is near unintelligible. I’ve pasted a few paras below. She must be a graduate of Melbourne University. Technical manuals for Stealth Bombers make more sense. FICTION: Intimacies, Katie Kitamura, Jonathan Cape, $32.99 “Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is an existential thriller with a shadow text about the systems, the…

This blog is meant to be about writing but my beloved Labrador crossed with a Rottweiler (a Labweiler), passed away last Thursday morning. The grief has poleaxed me and all writing has stopped for a while. One morning during the scorching summer of 2008, as my wife and me pulled in to a market north…

Spare a thought for the five Booker Prize judges. The judges who live in the UK and USA, have had to read all 158 eligible novels at a rate of about one novel per day. What was novel seven I read? Beats me. They then create a long list and then a short-list. How they…

This is from The New Yorker a few years back. It’s a piss-take on political correctness on campus. “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” —the Atlantic….

There’s a scene in the film ‘Death of Stalin’, where three senior government ministers are sitting in a car planning to kill Beria. One of them has bought a yapping dog, because they’re so fearful they’ll be overheard, even though the car is parked in a forest. One of the characters says, “I’ve had nightmares…