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Uneasy lay my head when I ran the RMIT professional and creative writing programs. I had almost 800 students studying creative writing (including screenwriters) and I was doing my utmost to enrol more, not only from Melbourne but across Australia. Yet something didn’t sit right. I remember asking lecturers Delia Falconer and Laurie Clancy, if…

One of the more curious aspects of creative writing – and here I’m predominantly pointing to short story competitions – is how the imagination is railroaded by the news agenda. Real life is lived outside the highly constructed, framed and decontextualised news. What we see, read and hear on the news is framed to elicit…

As Johnny Rotten said, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” This post isn’t about writing but about lies told to us by our government about the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban – although many of those were in writing. Australian and American troops (and others) have been there for 20 years. Longer than…

I used to spend up big on new and used books. In my 30s and 40s, I had a library that covered the walls of the second floor of my house. I was a big fiction and non-fiction reader – and poetry too. I used to think there was an intellectual pay-off by reading so…

Jane Sullivan from The Age has waded in to the literary prize debate. She flagged that in a survey of winners of the Miles Franklin over the last 64 years, they were predominantly won by white men from NSW in their 40s and 50s. Sullivan is right. Back in the 60s and 70s, men ruled…

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of small businesses have gone to the wall. We’re witnessing an ECONOMIC middle class protest and the government is punching its one thought: lockdown. But it didn’t order nearly enough vaccines. With a one in a million chance of dying from the…

People are still reading and buying books but small, independent bookshops are going to the wall. Lockdowns are doing what Amazon and Booktopia threatened to do. Lindfield Bookshop in Sydney closed a couple of years ago as did Pages and Pages. Dymocks in Lane Cove closed when the landlord retook possession. I think Dymocks in…

I read Paige Clarke’s article in the SMH recently and it started me thinking – and not for the first time – that Australian literary culture is in deep, deep shit. Clarke’s a good writer. She writes from the heart and that’s good enough. She may even be a great writer just as long as…

The winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Award is Amanda Lohrey’s novel The Labyrinth. Written as thigh-slapping yarn, using humour, irony and satire, it’s a work that holds a mirror up to the values of Australian publishing industry. “Erica Marsden buys an old shack in a secluded community on Australia’s south-east coast. She’s there because…