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 months. She didn’t think her novel, Love and Virtue, would ever be published, but it won book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.

The book is a darkly comic campus story exploring sex, power, and consent, through the eyes of two women in their first year at university in Sydney.

Critics have predicted it will become an Australian classic, but Ms Reid said her novel may simply be timely.

“We’ve seen just how keen the public is to have a conversation about consent, and we’ve had so many amazing activists who have brought those issues to the forefront,” she said.

Ms Reid has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Law from Sydney University.

Former AFL footballer Adam Goodes took out the children’s picture book category with Somebody’s Land: Welcome to Our Country, co-written by Ellie Laing and illustrated by David Hardy.

The book is an introduction to first nations history and the idea of ‘terra nullius’ for a young audience.

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’), Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Yates, Diane Cook and Annie Dillard.

‘The Ram in the Thicket’ Wright Morris

‘Sonny’s Blues’, James Baldwin

‘The Country Husband’, John Cheever (too many to mention)

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ Joyce Carol Oates

‘St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves’, Karen Russell

‘A New Wave Format,’ Bobbie Ann Mason

‘The Red Neck Way of Knowledge’, Blanche McCary Boyd

‘Greasy Lake’, T.C Boyle

‘The Conductor’, Aleksandar Hemon

‘The Fix,’ Percival Everett

‘The Things They Carried’, Tim O’Brien

‘Gryphon’, Charles Baxter

‘Rock Springs’, Richard Ford

‘People Like That are the Only People Here’, Lorrie Moore

‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’, Raymond Carver

‘Helping’, Robert Stone

‘How to Talk to a Hunter’, Pam Houston

‘Oxygen’, Ron Carlson

‘The Girl on the Plane’, Mary Gaitskill

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, keyboard or bass player).

The ‘Alts’ were those people attracted to the alternative music world of the late 70s, 80s and 90s. They were the type of people at parties, I wanted to punch in the face. So up themselves. They lived in their little cloistered world and raved about Ian Curtis from Joy Division or some other poor bastard who’d hung himself or overdosed.

I knew where they were coming from – an anti-commercial perspective. They were always on the hunt for a new sound and as such, they were boring pratts. I went out with a couple of ‘Alt women’ and I was struck by how narrow-minded they were. There’s a scene in the movie High Fidelity in the record shop, which nails their elitist behaviour.

Now the Australian media is fawning over David McComb, the dead lead singer of The Triffids. He croaked in 1999. The fact he kept on drinking and taking drugs with a serious heart condition at 36 years of age, is curious. Maybe that adds to the mystique, the myth making, the nostalgia, the fetish. A cardiologist would call him a fuckwit.

The Triffids were a good band – the influence of the band Television was profound – and had some great songs: Farmers never visit Nightclubs, Hell of a Summer (a classic) and Wide Open Road, to name a few. The Triffids were not all about David McComb. They were a good band.

One of the problems of being an ‘Alt’ band was remaining true to the fans, while starving to death through a lack of airplay and selling records. As Lindy Morrison once said, “If we (The Go Betweens) were so fucking good, why didn’t people buy our fucking records?”

Ahhh, Yes. That’s another story.

I read some of David McComb’s poetry, Beautiful Waste (Fremantle Press). It’s still in my bookcase somewhere, with one or two dog-earred poems. He had a good turn of phrase but he was no William Carlos Williams or John Forbes. No matter how much the Alts want to turn him in to Keats, it ain’t going to happen.

Ms Tomazin failed to mention the role Cancel Culture has played in banning books and attacking authors but if you’re having a crack at the God-botherers, why would you? Except of course it’s critical to the story and it’s even flagged in the headline.

Now, if you pair that story with my story on book banning and Cancel Culture, which appeared (oddly) in Quadrant (no one else would publish it), then you’ve got a snap shot on the political sewer bubbling below literary publications (fiction and non fiction).

It’s weird because elements of the bonkers far left Cancel Culture Red Guards have much in common with the bonkers far right Christians in the States. Got a problem? Ban it.

As Bob Roberts said in the movie of the same name, “the times are changing back“.

“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 a statement.

Didion emerged as a writer of substance in the late 1960s as an early practitioner of “new journalism”, which allowed writers to take a more-personalised perspective.

Her 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, was an unsympathetic view of the emerging hippie culture in San Francisco. A New York Times review called the book “some of the finest magazine pieces published by anyone in this country in recent years.”

Didion had an air of casual glamour and writerly cool and in her heyday. She was typically photographed in oversized sunglasses or lounging nonchalantly with a cigarette dangling from a hand.

Tragedy inadvertently led to a career resurgence in the 2000s as Didion wrote of the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Blue Nights.

British writer Martin Amis referred to Didion as the “poet of the Great Californian Emptiness” and she was especially incisive in writing about the state.

FICTION: Intimacies, Katie Kitamura, Jonathan Cape, $32.99

“Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is an existential thriller with a shadow text about the systems, the narratives, and the ambiguities that position the way we relate to each other and the way we see ourselves. The American writer – who has authored three novels, including A Separation – renders the intricacies of human relationships with the lustre and soulfulness of a Dutch painter.

Katie Kitamura’s novel demonstrates that stories themselves are equal parts light and shadow.

As in Rembrandt’s paintings, subtlety is key to Kitamura’s achievements. She brings her talent for imagery and close reading of relationships to the story of an unnamed translator in an unnamed court in The Hague.

Intimacies makes elegant architecture of the unmissable spectre of colonialism. Kitamura is a writer who can create large shadows from the smallest of objects and her plotting provides an object lesson in the ambiguity of human relationships.

When the colonialism theme arrives it is dramatised in a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Judith Leyster, whose The Propositioncomes to stand for the ambiguous and sometimes fraught power relations in the book – between genders, races, and classes.

The painting represents “two irreconcilable subjective positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardour and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation”. This schism echoes several of the book’s themes and contrasts. The power relations can be read as between nations and states, rather than only between men and women.”

Katie Kitamura’s novel, Intimacies…

Existential? Like Sartre, Camus or simply existing?

Shadow text? What the hell is that?

Elegant architecture? Fuck me dead…

I don’t mean to be hard on Ms Francesca but there’s a readership out there who really want to know if this is a good book and if so, in simple terms, why? If not, tell ‘em to save their $32.99 and tell ‘em why. It ain’t rocket science.

One morning during the scorching summer of 2008, as my wife and me pulled in to a market north of Adelaide, we saw four puppies for sale in the back of an old ute.

I gave one of the black pups a tweak on the ear and she quickly sunk her fangs in to my thumb. It was love at first bite.

My wife named her Georgy, after The Seeker’s song, Georgy Girl, “walking down the street so fancy free…”

She travelled everywhere with us and gave unconditional love which was returned in buckets. She was a sea dog for most of her life and that’s where her ashes will go.

I’m not one given to crying but I cried for three days after she died. How precious the bond is between owner and dog, although in reality, she owned me, heart and soul.

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 do that is a secret only the Druids know.

The judging panel is chaired by historian Maya Jasanoff and includes twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma and writer and former Archbishop Rowan Williams.

“We had each been absorbed in our own little isolated bubbles, in this unique process — and then [in judging meetings] we got to see the only other four people in the world who had experienced exactly the same thing,” Jasanoff said.

Whether they had experienced exactly the same thing is a philosophical point but let’s carry on.

These poor bastards then have to re-read the 13 longlisted novels.

The shortlist is here.

They will then re-read the shortlisted novels yet again, before choosing a winner.

Maya Jasanoff has given us a precis of some of the novels.

“Some are acutely introspective, taking us into the mind of a Tamil man tracing the scars of Sri Lanka’s civil war, and an American woman unplugging from the internet to cope with a family crisis. Some enter communities in the throes of historical transformation: the Cardiff docklands in the early years of British decolonisation, and the veld around Pretoria in the last years of apartheid. And some have global sweep, following a mid-century aviator in her attempt to circumnavigate the planet, and a present-day astrobiologist raising a son haunted by climate change.”

Load up on Xanax as there are some thigh slappers there.

The 2021 winner of The Booker Prize will be announced on Wednesday, November 3.

Personally, I’d save your money and spend it on Guy Fawkes night on November 5.

“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.

PREAMBLE

We the People [not ALL the people] of the United States [U.S.-centric!] in Order to form a more perfect Union [singles’ therapy and anatomy-neutral gingerbread persons available to uncoupled undergrads] establish Justice [students unfairly punished for “wrong” answers on organic-chemistry exam should join the Tweet for A’s study group], insure domestic Tranquility [teaching assistants who are married but still exploring their socio-sexual identities advised to stop reading now], provide for the common defence [those who have ever felt intimidated by campus security, please gather in the cafeteria, Thursday at 2 p.m., for Stoning ‘n Donuts] promote the general Welfare [warning: could cause distress to anyone not happy all the time], and secure the Blessings [anti-atheistic] of Liberty [full disclosure: I’m going outside now to dumpster-dive for lunch and do community service—it’s a beautiful day, though I mustn’t forget that the fine weather is a serious indicator of global warming] to ourselves [the Committee of Apologies feels shame that the Founding Parents used such a possessive, exclusive, and egomaniacal pronoun] and . . . [The length of this Preamble, which consists entirely of one complex sentence, is discriminatory to those suffering from A.D.D., as well as other learning issues, so we are skipping ahead to Article I, Section 1; not that we’re implying that there’s anything wrong with a disorder, or even learning, as long as it is consensual.]

ARTICLE I, SECTION 1

All legislative Powers [the Task Force Against Privilege cannot condone Power unless everyone shares in it equally] herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives [the Advisory Group on Pity and Off-Campus Living says that this is a micro-aggression against Representatives experiencing Homelessness or Houselessness—to prevent more trauma, we shall close our eyes until Section 3].

ARTICLE I, SECTION 3

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote [anyone not counting-abled: please turn to turquoise page in the Color-Coded Constitution. You can pick up a copy in the Office of Students Against Facts].

One of the characters says, “I’ve had nightmares that made more sense than this.”

I feel that way about Jessie Tu having a crack at Irish writer, Sally Rooney in The Age. I’ve heard of Rooney but I’ve not read either woman’s works. My neice loves Rooney’s books.

Tu can’t understand – and even questions her own sanity – why Rooney is receiving such high praise for her novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People.

To quote Tu, “… her stories merely celebrate privileged white people doing privileged white things including going to elite colleges, voluntarily sleeping with bad men, having hang-ups about those bad men, and, if you’re a woman, asking to be hit by them during sex (and making that seem cool, or “grown-up”). Her female characters are depressed, starving, diligently maintaining extremely thin bodies, but oh, they’re also neurotic geniuses.”

Sounds like Rooney is aiming for the American market. Tu’s main compliant, (I think), is that Rooney’s books are full of young white rich people doing what young white rich kids do. There’s hardly a black person in sight and Asians are described as tourists. We’re all tourists.

Rooney is an Irish writer and as there are less than 2 per cent of black people in Ireland who identify as black, it’s possible that the notion of including a person of colour never occurred to her.

Tu goes on to say that, “It’s no coincidence that the praise for Rooney has been spearheaded by liberal white women who might have attended elite private schools and had an elite college education, probably drink tea as excessively as Rooney’s characters…”

That pretty much sums up the literary fiction buying public in America, Britain and Australia. Have you ever been to a writer’s festival? It’s a sea of ‘darling’ this and ‘darling’ that and many still pine for a return of Gough Whitlam (without the stagflation), although their banker husbands might baulk at that.

PC orthodoxy will only allow Rooney to write anglo-white characters. Include coloured folk, Eskimos, Aborigines, Muslims, etc, etc, and you’re guilty of cultural and religious appropriation and you’re fucked.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing because when people like Tu write news stories about people like Rooney, the latter’s sales go up another 10,000.