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Let’s cut to the chase. Most literary fiction teachers have sold bugger-all books. They’re not in Premier League. They’re Leigh RMI or Farnsborough, languishing at the bottom of Third division. And you want these people to help you write a novel? Get real. In Australia, the only top shelf writing teacher is JM Coetzee at…

OK. I admit when I picked this book up and I saw she had completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Melbourne Uni and then sat at the feet of a literary parasite of yesteryear to polish the manuscript, I was going to King hit it. Turgid trash. Bum wipe, etc. Then I read the…

I wasn’t surprised to learn Sinead O’Connor had died. Her son killed himself last year and she said at the time, she had little to live for. O’Connor was born in Dublin 1966 and was sent to a reform school for girls but left in her mid-teens to focus on a music career. She moved…

I blame Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and to a lesser degree, Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, for the guff written by many young Australian fiction writers today. Libby Angel’s novel, Where I Sleep is fair average quality taken from diaries of the narrator’s time in Melbourne in the 1990s. It’s about a young failed…

The UK Chichester Festival is hosting a revival of The Sound of Music, but those planning to attend have been warned they “may find certain themes distressing”. The Festival said the production contains themes of: “Music; family; romance; the threat of Nazi Germany and the annexation of Austria,” as the plot follows the story of…

I never knew why Fifi showed up at RMIT Professional Writing. She was a refugee teacher from the TAFE Business School in Berk Street. I put down my dry martini and copy of Tattler and said, ‘welcome aboard’ and made a note to write three more short courses to pay for her salary. It was…

Remember how PWC (Price Waterhouse) boycotted the last Writer’s Week because they had some Palestinian writers speaking? https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/pwc-withdraws-support-for-adelaide-festival-20230228-p5co3t.html Now PWC is in deep, deep, deep shit. I wrote about the accountant-consultant corruption issue back in 2019 in Opinion Online, ‘Auditors without Border’, when InDaily in Adelaide was too chicken shit to publish it. In a…

If it’s not censorious religious loonies, it’s the PC Red Guards fucking with fiction. It was only a matter of time before they came after Hemingway. Would-be readers of Hemingway are now warned about the “language” and “attitudes” contained in his writing, and alerted to the novelist’s “cultural representations”. A disclaimer printed in the latest…

I’ve been lucky in my career. In the early days I worked on farms, in factories, built stages for bands and roamed the outback as a shot firer for a seismic team in WA and Queensland. I’ve worked as a journalist and in PR and in senior roles for a Prime Minister, three senators and…

Here is the short list for this year’s Miles Franklin Award: I want to exhort all Anglo Saxon Australians – especially males and those who signify as male – to have a crack at the MF next year. If Robbie Arnott can do it that means a Bruce, Craig, Maxine or a Narelle has a…