Posts tagged 'writers'

In a nice departure from the traditional Australia Day focus on flags and sporting heroes, The Sunday Age has marked the lead-up to the occasion with an editorial decrying our ‘tendency to anti-intellectualism’.

It lamented the fact that Australia’s ‘great writers, artists, soldiers, politicians and scientists … take second place to footballers, cricketers, swimmers and tennis players’.

‘As we approach Australia Day and make our plans for the beach or the backyard, it’s worth reflecting on what we are losing through this neglect of our classics. They are our stories written in our voices, and give us specific clues as to how we became the country we are today.’

In an opinion piece published alongside the editorial, Michael Heyward, publisher of Text Publishing, argued that while Australia has come a long way in recent decades when it comes to valuing and celebrating our homegrown authors, we ‘seem not to care’ about the great authors and books of our past, neglecting to keep them in print and to consistently teach them in our universities.

‘Those of us who choose and influence what people might read – publishers, professors, teachers, journalists, commentators, editors – have done a lamentable job of curating the primary materials of our literary history,’ wrote Heyward.

He said it will take ‘all kinds of effort’ to change both publishing and academic cultures. Increased adaption of Australian novels to film and television was one proposed solution, while he also suggested that the rise of the eBook ‘may liberate some writers from the dungeons of neglect’.

Making old books new

Text will release a new series, Text Australian Classics, in 2012, featuring titles such as David Ireland’s (currently out of print) The Glass Canoe, winner of the 1976 Miles Franklin Award, as well as earlier works by current favourites such as Kate Grenville and Peter Temple.

It’s not the first time Text has dabbled in resurrecting neglected works of Australian writing. In 2009, Madeleine St John’s debut novel The Women in Black (1993) – never before published in Australia, though set in Sydney – was published in a handsome new edition, packaged with accolades from much-loved Australians like Barry Humphries, Helen Garner and Clive James. The novel, a sharp-witted, affectionate portrait of a group of women working in the ladies department of a store much like David Jones, was embraced by both critics and readers; it was followed by new editions of St John’s subsequent novels.

Christina Stead’s work has enjoyed renewed interest thanks to some high profile endorsers. Watch our session The Late Great: Christina Stead here.

The endorsement of a popular writer was also integral to the recent renewal of interest in Christina Stead, after The Man Who Loved Children (1940) was given a rave review by Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times. Melbourne University Press published a new edition, with a stylish cover and introduction by Franzen, shortly afterwards. This was followed by new editions of Letty Fox: Her Luck (with a foreword by Carmen Callil) and For Love Alone (with a foreword by Drusilla Modjeska).

Stylish new editions and canny endorsements or introductions designed to lure new readers seem to be an integral (and, it seems, effective) part of the publisher’s bag of tricks when relaunching forgotten or neglected classics – literally making the old new again.

Books on film

Another Australian classic, Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), enjoyed a resurgence thanks to these tricks (an introduction by Peter Temple and afterword by David Stratton) when the 1971 film was restored and re-released in 2009. The film attracted a wave of media coverage and allowed an accompanying film tie-in edition (again, from Text Publishing, who had also published a 1993 edition).

Barbara Creed, head of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne, told The Age that she agreed with Heyward about the need for more Australian novels on the screen. She said, ‘Whenever a novel is adapted to screen … there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.’

Young appetites for Oz lit

Creed also said that a dedicated Australian literature course was back on the university’s syllabus this year. Last year, a group of students had started their own Australian literature studies, in the absence of such a subject. (‘An unusual situation,‘ Creed said.)

This enthusiasm from students so actively keen to steep themselves in Australian writing is, at least, a good sign.

The Wheeler Centre will run a free series of ten events entitled ‘Australian Literature 101' from next month. Details will be released, along with our February-April programme in full, next Friday 3 February.

The roll call of global literary luminaries gracing the Wheeler Centre this year was nothing less than astonishing. Let’s revisit some of the highlights of our international guests.

In March, Annie Proulx spoke about designing a “bibliothèque” in her new home, built on a property where she’s discovered obsidian fragments from Yellowstone and 2700-year-old charcoal beneath a mere inch of topsoil. Andrew O'Hagan discussed the role of the novelist against the dangerous lure of newspaper controversy and a culture that threatens to “understand less and condemn more”.

Yannick Haenel told one of the most arresting stories we’ve ever heard at the Gala Night of Storytelling (here’s the translation), and in a separate event described the challenges of writing his partly fictionalised account of a little-known chapter of World War 2 history and of the importance of bearing witness. Murong Xuecun discussed his sometimes controversial characters and explored the challenges that face an ‘independent’ writer in modern China.

In April, Jeffrey Archer talked about his first love – politics – and his respect for Margaret Thatcher, whom he described as one of three women who have profoundly affected and influenced him. Meg Rosoff confessed that she’s interested in characters rather than plots, and shared the advice she’s been given about writing novels. David Mitchell told us about his fear of being boring (not a chance). Michael Cunningham complimented Australians on our balance between “a kind of gravitas and a good joke … that’s hard to find in a lot of places”. Thank you.

Michael Connelly told us about the important editorial input of his mother, a fan of crime fiction who first introduced her son to the genre, and how she felt about his modern style of mystery writing which allows for more unanswered questions. Sir Terry Pratchett spoke on his thoughts on death and religion. TJ Clark was eloquent on the topics of art, poetry, death, truth and love. Anita Shreve described the Oprah phenomenon with Jane Sullivan.

Jonathan Safran Foer told us he had “no conception” of himself as a writer: “To me, it sounded like saying, ‘I’m a lover’. It didn’t seem like something one should say.” Finally, one of our favourite guests, Jon Ronson, told us he suspects he suffers from about a dozen mental disorders and concluded that anxiety disorders are indicative of moral goodness. Whether he succeeded in his aim “to try and make wet doubt seem attractive” is for you to decide.

The Literature Board of the Australia Council has announced the first three of eight recipients of their Book2 grants. The grants are worth $50,000 over three years and are intended to lessen the pressure on writers writing their second book. The recipients are Nam Le, Anna Krien and Favel Parrett.

In a media release making the announcement, Susan Hayes, Director of Literature at the Australia Council, says, “[F]or many writers, the second book will be the most difficult of their career … This is particularly the case for literary writers, whose first book will have attracted considerable critical acclaim but a relatively low contribution to their income.” Book2 is part of the Australia Council’s Creative Australia Artists' Grants program.

A new biography of Kurt Vonnegut has invoked a ill-tempered man consumed by bitterness and loneliness, a shadow of the avuncular persona well known to his adoring fans. The biography alleges that Vonnegut was convinced his work was undervalued by the American literary establishment despite the massive impact of such novels as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. The biography raises an age-old question: should we judge a creative work by its creator?

In a recent Wheeler Centre event, literary critic Simon Leys argued that we mustn’t judge a writer by their work, nor a literary work by its creator. “The greatest creators in world literature,” said Leys, “literally do not necessarily know what they are doing. They may intend to do one thing, but what they actually achieve may be quite different.” Citing Cervantes, Gogol and Tolstoy, Leys noted that time and again writers have misunderstood their achievement.

But Leys identifies an even more perplexing conundrum, which he calls the problem of biography, citing several authors to testify to the dimensions of a great paradox. “Biography does not explain one damn thing,” wrote poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky. “Every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats, too humiliating to contemplate,” said George Orwell. The ever-controversial VS Naipaul said, “Everything of value about me is in my books only.” French poet Paul Valery wrote, “Every individual is inferior to his most beautiful work.” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “I never knew a man who was consonant with his work, when the work is of genius. When the work is of genius, he is far below it … it is not the mere man who does the thing, it is the man inspired. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent to him from outside.”

Citing two great French writers with Fascist leanings, Leys goes on to ask, “How can one ever explain this contradiction between a work and its author? Greatness of the work, mediocrity of the man; beauty of the work, vulgarity or downright ugliness of the man.” Leys cites Proust’s theory of two selves to explain the conundrum: “A book is the product of a different self from the self manifest is our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there that we may arrive at it.”

Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap, has been nominated for a Bad Sex Award by the Literary Review. It’s the 19th year the awards have been held to celebrate the worst depictions of sexual activity in literature. Nominated for the award is a passage from Dead Europe, Tsiolkas' third novel, which has been published in the United Kingdom this year (along with Tsiolkas' first book, Loaded) on the back of the success of The Slap.

It’s hardly a slap in the face for the Melbourne writer – Dead Europe has received some admiring reviews, and at any rate there’s always been something, ahem, tongue-in-cheek about the award. Indeed, Tsiolkas is in august company. Haruki Murakami is a nominee, as is Stephen King. Extracts of all the nominees are available on the Guardian website, which on its Woman’s Blog page asks the question, why are men so bad at writing sex?

A Jane Austen scholar believes it highly likely that Jane Austen died of arsenic poisoning. Although she won’t rule out the possibility that Austen was murdered, Lindsay Ashford believes Austen is most likely to have been prescribed medecine in which arsenic was an ingredient. The Guardian reports that tests on a lock of Austen’s hair currently owned by private collectors has found an unusually high level of arsenic.

Jane Austen was only 41 when she died, and the cause of her death has been the cause of some speculation among Austen scholars. Arsenic – the byproduct of purification techniques for copper, lead and gold — was a plentiful by-product of Britain’s booming mining industries. In Austen’s day, it was “handed out in the form of Fowler’s Solution as a treatment for everything from rheumatism – something Austen complained of in her letters – to syphilis,” according to the Guardian piece. Here’s more on the medical uses of arsenic in Victorian England.

A new UK publishing venture is bringing crowdfunding to the book world. Unbound lets authors pitch their novels-in-progress to readers, who then decide whether or not they want to contribute to the financial costs of having the book written and published.

The website already features book projects by Monty Python regular Terry Jones and respected mid-career author Tibor Fischer, but it also plans to make room for first-time authors too, like debutant Jennifer Pickup, whose novel Unbelievable was fully funded by readers. Readers can opt to contribute to a project at several levels, each one of which offers a reward. More than an act of charity or patronage, these rewards give readers value for money. For example, a contribution of £10 to Vitali Vitaliev’s Bad Food Tales: An Anti-Tourist Guide to Italy is rewarded with ebook edition, access to the author’s shed (essentially updates on the writing of the book) and the reader’s name in the back of the book. Readers can contribute at higher levels too, each one of which has its own rewards. The highest contribution level for this title (they vary from title to title) £500, the reward for which is “Everything up to and including launch party level & spend a day with me, learning about my work as an author, journalist, editor and presenter, include a tour of Pegasus Cottage, where I do my writing, and a special Italian lunch cooked by me.”

Unbound is the brainchild of publishers John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran, deputy editor of the magazine, The Idler, and is one of several new publishing business models emerging in the digital realm – check them all out in this Wired feature. Read more about Unbound here..

It’s a movement that started way back in 1999, when 21 people in the San Francisco area pledged to write a novel in a month. Last year, its 12th, 200,000 aspiring novels the world over made the same pledge, writing some 2.8 billion words, or nigh on 100 million words a day.

It’s National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and the idea is simple: participants have all 30 days in November to write 50,000 words of a novel. They can plan, they can plot, but they can’t start early and they can’t use any pre-written material in the body of their novel. Other than that, there are few restrictions: any genre is allowed, in any format, any language, using any theme. Writers don’t even need to finish the novel – the 50,000 words can be a partial novel. A manuscript of 50,000 words equates to a short novel of about 175 pages in length amounts to the same length as The Great Gatsby – not a long novel, but a novel nevertheless. Conventionally, the 40,000 word mark distinguishes a novel from a novella.

Though NaNoWriMo isn’t a competition, it does have winners – anyone who completes the task is a winner and, after the word count is verified, their name is added to NaNoWriMo’s winner’s page. The philosophy is simple – quantity trumps quality, the idea being that quality comes later, with careful revision and redrafting. Here’s a list of writers who’ve had their NaNoWriMo novels published.

“If you allow this toxic combination of religion and politics to become too closely entwined, then you’re in trouble.” In her recent Lunchbox/Soapbox, Dr Susan Mitchell spoke on the topic of her newly-released polemic on opposition leader Tony Abbott, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man (watch the video). She explored at some length the influence of the Catholic Church on the man many are inking in as a shoe-in for prime minister following the next election. Tony Abbott, Mitchell argued, “has allowed religion and politics to become entwined.” Indeed, if Abbott were to become prime minister, he would be the first practising Catholic prime minister of Australia from the conservative side of politics (there have been, by our count, three on the Labor side: James Scullin, Joseph Lyons and Ben Chifley).

Mitchell, adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University, a radio and television broadcaster, and a former opinion and humour writer for The Australian, presented Tony Abbott as a man who sees things in black and white. She attributed this to his Catholic faith, listing key Catholic mentors in Abbott’s youth. Father Emmett Costello, a Jesuit priest in Sydney’s Riverview College, trained Abbott in Churchillian rhetoric and encouraged him to enter politics. At university, Abbott was a protégé of B.A. Santamaria, an influential anti-Communist journalist and Catholic activist who believed the Church should instruct Australians how to vote and, Mitchell contends, taught Abbott that “politics is a way to give glory to God in the human sphere”. Another Jesuit priest at Oxford University encouraged Abbott to take up boxing. At the age of 26, Abbott chose to enter St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly. He later discontinued his religious studies and became a journalist, writing for The Catholic Weekly for a time.

While Tony Abbott has never shied away from acknowledging the importance of the Catholic Church to him as a person and as a politician, he is nevertheless capable of having a foot in both camps (Church and state) when the situation requires it. How does he justify this? In a speech he gave in 2004 to the Adelaide University Democratic Club decrying the annual number of women having abortions, he had this to say on how Christian politicians should juggle their responsibilities to Church and state.

“Despite the debt that political institutions owe to the West’s Christian heritage, there is the constant claim that Christians in politics are confused about the separation of church and state. There’s also a tendency among Christians in the community to think that Christians in politics have to sell out their principles in order to survive. Christian politicians are often warding off simultaneous accusations that they are zealots or fakes. Indeed, the public caricature of a Christian politician is hypocrite or wuss, in denial about the ruthlessness and expediency necessary to wield power, or too sanctimonious to be effective … Christians are not required to right every wrong. Christian politicians are not required to promote policies for which there is no demand in the community.”

The next Intelligence Squared debate on 15 November at the Melbourne Town Hall will debate the proposition, ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world’.

(Click to watch video.)

“[A]lthough the Man Booker can change a writer’s life, a prize is only a prize,” Booker Prize judge Gaby Wood has written in the Telegraph. “It’s not an investigation, it’s not a work of criticism, and it’s not the result of common-or-garden enjoyment, either. There are all sorts of other lives books can have.”

The judge’s words seem to be a direct response to unprecedented criticism levelled at the Man Booker Prize this year. The prize, worth a little over A$75,000, is arguably the highest-profile English-language literary award. For what it’s worth, Julian Barnes took the honours this year, after having been thrice shortlisted, for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. According to Michael Wood in the London Review of Books, the novel, the chief theme of which is “Englishness”, is “the story of an obtuseness that generally cannot see the damage it does, and yet in a brief moment of illumination grasps the malevolence lurking in what it took to be its quiet life.”

The Booker’s profile is matched, as Guy Rundle points out on Crikey, by its idiosyncrasies. “Everything about the Booker is bizarre,” Rundle writes, “from its name – which fuses current sponsor the Man Group, with half of the original sponsor, Booker-McConnell – to the ever-changing judges, to the degree of anguished debate it draws about the state of the culture”. Much of the Booker anguish this year has been about an alleged dumbing-down of the award, following statements by the chief judgment, former British spy chief (and spy novelist) Stella Riminton, in which she stressed that the judges had prioritised “readable” novels in the shortlisting process: “"We want people to buy these books and read them, not buy them and admire them.”

Jeanette Winterson weighed in impressively on the debate in The Guardian. Under the headline, ‘Ignore the Booker brouhaha: readability is no test for literature’, she writes that the row “is a misunderstanding about literature and its purpose. We are nervous about anything that seems elitist or inaccessible, and we apologise for the arts in a way that we never do for science.”

According to Rundle, the dumbing-down began about a decade ago (and signals the death of “reflexive humanism”). But the Booker’s been odd ever since it was first awarded in 1969. The official website says the prize is awarded to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.” Given the Commonwealth is an accident of history nowadays as peculiar as it is irrelevant (Mozambique, anyone?), it should be of no surprise that these two character traits are reflected in the Booker – and yet the table-thumping oddly persists. The Booker is a booster for British publishing (Barnes' publisher is printing an additional 25,000 extra copies of The Sense of an Ending as a result of his win) and, given the inwardness of US literary prizes, the English language – arguably the globe’s most fecund literary language – has hitherto lacked a truly all-encompassing literary prize.

No more, following news that a new prize, dubbed the Prize for Literature, will be set up to reward to reward “quality and ambition”. The prizemoney is still being raised, but an impressive phalanx of writers (including John Banville, Pat Barker, Nicole Krauss and David Mitchell) are reported to be backing the prize.

“We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.” Hundreds of writers have lent their names to the website Occupy Writers to support the Occupy Wall Street movement and others like it spawning in cities across the globe (including Melbourne).

The list is a literary who’s who and includes names like Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Tariq Ali, Ann Beattie, Noam Chomsky, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Sasha Frere-Jones, Nell Freudenberger, Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Lethem, China Mieville, Rick Moody, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, Donna Tartt, Alice Walker, Ann Patchett and Naomi Wolf. Australian writers on the list include Alison Croggon and Paddy O'Reilly.

Some are going a step further, penning work for publication n the Occupy Writers website. Daniel Handler, better known by his sobriquet Lemony Snicket, the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, has published a list entitled, ‘Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance’. It’s a plea for social justice made in typical Lemony Snicket style. We especially liked points 4 (“4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices”), 10 (“It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view”) and 13 (“99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree”).

In July, the Wheeler Centre ran a promotion inviting you to subscribe to our enewsletter. As a sweetener, we offered one randomly-selected new subscriber a trip to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, which has just ended. We called it the Ultimate Book Lover’s prize. The lucky winner was Deb Sestak, who has been kind enough to send us this taster of the festival. Thanks to all of you who subscribed, and thanks to the festival and to the competition sponsors, Garuda and the Honeymoon Guesthouse/Casa Luna Bali.

Bali is a wonderful place for a festival – we have become regulars at a local spa treating ourselves to a daily massage. Today we got up early and went for a stroll around the rice paddies before breakfast. After a quick dip in the pool we caught the shuttle bus to the festival office, collected our passes and headed up to Neka for our first festival event. We were seated in a massive pergola, seating more than 200 on top of a steep ravine overlooking lush green foliage onto rice paddies on the next ridge, with a warm breeze wafting through. Paradise.

There are so many standout writers at the festival. At a panel discussion, Kunal Basu talked about his latest book, The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. Alex Miller picked up the syphilis theme and morphed it into a story about white ants. Greg Day kept the white ants theme going talking about his formative experiences.

We were inspired by Rob Lilwall and his adventures chronicled in Cycling Home from Siberia and intrigued by Andrew Fowler’s tales of Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

Our favourite, though, was Tariq Ali. He has the face of a walrus, weary but wise, and shares his vast knowledge, resting his chin in his hand, with humour, compassion and immense humility. He brought cheers from the audience with his final remarks about Australia being “the permanent aircraft carrier for the US”.

We ended the day watching an evening performance of Ketchuk dance followed by a drink at the Lotus Café and ‘Words in Motion’ set against the vast backdrop of the gate and walls of the Saraswati Temple. Bliss. We are already looking forward to next year.

Its title is now a stock-standard phrase of the English language. It’s sold some 30 million copies since it was first published some 75 years ago. It single-handedly invented a new kind of book, one that now sells in the millions annually. It even inspired not one but two satirical memoirs (the first published in 1937, and the second in 2001, now an eponymous film). It’s Dale Carnegie’s self-help Bible, How to Win Friends and Influence People (satirised in the aforementioned memoirs as How to Lose Friends and Alienate People).

Dale Carnegie was the quintessential American success story of the early 20th century. As a farmer’s son, he’d dreamed of being an instructor in the Chautauqua adult education movement. After failing as an actor, the soap salesman-cum-autodidact (then known as Carnagay) found his calling as a public speaking instructor, publishing books on public speaking for business. His business thrived, he changed his name (Carnegie was the name of a well-known steel baron) and became successful by teaching the aspiring American middle classes how to be successful. At the time How to Win Friends was published, in the thick of the Great Depression, Carnegie was earning the equivalent of $10,000 a week.

Despite the faintly creepy title, Dale Carnegie’s manual took a benign view of human relationships that eventually came to be emblematic of the sunny side of mid-century American capitalism. The book espoused a win-win model of interaction grounded in a Christian, ‘do-unto-others’ moral framework, stressing that, on the whole, acting with politeness, empathy, honesty and integrity – as well as basic social niceties like listening to people and remembering their names – would encourage others to behave similarly in return.

Now, the original self-help bestseller has been reworked for the 21st century – but the results may not be either winning or particularly influential. Dale Carnegie Training, the descendant of the company founded by Carnegie 99 years ago, has re-released the book for the socially-networked era. How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age offers tips on email etiquette and how to avoid the common Twitter mistakes that can damage careers irrevocably. Bloggers are encouraged to interact with their audience and due attention ought be paid to Facebook friend updates.

So how has the book been received? Dwight Garner in the New York Times laments the loss of the original’s homespun qualities: “This new adaptation seems to have been composed using refrigerator magnets stamped with corporate lingo.” Take, for example, this advice: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.” This sentence, Garner opines, is “so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead”.

(Click to watch video.)

One of the most fascinating of the many fascinating topics Jonathan Safran Foer discussed with Michael Williams during his recent Wheeler Centre conversation was on his mixed feelings about identifying as a writer. Even after the success of Everything is Illuminated, Safran says he had “no conception of [himself] as a writer”. “To me, it sounded like saying, ‘I’m a lover’. It didn’t seem like something one should say,” he argues, but admits “at a certain point it was just simply true.”

All the same, he contends that “writing is the vehicle and not the destination”. “The ends for me are a kind of emotional experience or a kind of access to thoughts and feelings that I can’t get anywhere else,” he explains.

Safran Foer’s entry into writing was unplanned. Without wanting to be a writer, he took a writing class at university, where Joyce Carol Oates took him under her wing, encouraging and mentoring him. He remembers a comment she made before a class one day as being the moment he realised there was such a thing as “my writing”. The support he experienced under Oates, he says, is the reason he now teaches students of his own. “The difference between writers and non writers is not [that] writers are better at writing,” he later adds. “It’s that writers write.”

He confesses to being a writer whose awareness of historical and critical context is not as keen as some of his peers, who are critics as well as writers. “I don’t think in that language of literary movements,” he explains. When pressed on the question of peers, he reveals his “natural” repulsion to the idea of being a part of a literary community or cohort. “Being a writer, to me, is being individual,” he clarifies, “so thinking about it in the opposite way makes me feel uncomfortable.”

The annual game of shadows and mirrors that accompanies the October announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature is in full swing. The Millions, a US online literary magazine, has published ‘An Open Letter to the Swedish Academy’, practically begging that Philip Roth be granted the prize, currently worth in excess of A$1,000,000. The letter’s writer is Michael Bourne, a Brooklyn writer of fiction and literary journalism, who writes, “Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?”

While the stature of Roth’s achievement is undeniable, his position as a writer of great prose isn’t beyond argument. Earlier this year, when Roth was granted the biennial Man Booker International prize at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Carmen Callil, one of the judges, quit over the decision, saying,“I don’t rate him as a writer at all, I made it clear that I wouldn’t have put him on the long list, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn’t admire – all the others were fine.”

Detail of the Nobel Prize gold medal, featuring the profile of the Prize’s benefactor, Swedish tycoon Alfred Nobel

While the million-dollar purse and ‘lifetime achievement’ quality makes the Nobel Prize for Literature the world’s highest-profile literary award, like every other prize the Nobel has its fair share of eccentricities. Not least among them is the stipulation by the endowment’s original benefactor, dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, that the prize be granted to a writer who has produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Precisely what an “ideal direction” might be is hard to define – Leo Tolstoy allegedly didn’t win a Nobel because his work wasn’t perceived as being “ideal” enough.

In a recent Guardian online podcast, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, defined literary worth and cultural importance as the two most significant qualities in deciding on the Nobel winner. In the same interview, Englund acknowledges that European literature is disproportionately represented among Nobel winners, adding that this is a natural consequence of the fact that the Swedish academicians are most exposed to European literature. Englund rejects the charge that Nobels are occasionally awarded on the basis of positive discrimination and adds that the Academy tries to be more inclusive by commissioning special, secret translations of major works by significant authors writing in non-European languages. Many canonical authors, including Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov and Borges, are not on the list of winners, which instead features names that have fallen into complete oblivion, like the inaugural 1901 winner, Sully Prudhomme, who was praised at the time for his “poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”.

There is no shortlist for the Nobel, but this in itself isn’t enough to dissuade publishers from re-releasing certain novels in the lead-up to the announcement and speculators from putting their hard-earned on the rumoured favourites. This year, the 81 year-old Syrian poet Adonis, the pen name of Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, is the odds-on favourite, not just because of his own achievements but also because of the events known as the Arabic Spring. “A combination of artistic excellence and social justice have often played well with the Nobel committee,” writes the LA Times blog, Jacket Copy.

Postscript: the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

Image of Michel Houellebecq in Poland via Mariusz Kubik/Wikipedia

French novelist Michel Houellebecq (reportedly pronounced WELL-beck) has gone missing, according to Bloomberg news agency. Houellebecq, the author of Atomised, Platform, The Possibility of an Island and a biography of HP Lovecraft, was on the eve of a book tour of the Netherlands and Belgium, promoting the release of the Dutch translation of his latest novel, The Map and the Territory.

The disappearance is the cause of some concern in publishing circles connected to the author because of the controversial and, at times, polarising nature of the author’s work. Houellebecq the man, who according to the Bloomberg report has struggled at times with mental illness, lives a quiet life in southern Spain. But Houellebecq the writer is variously described as an incisive visionary and a misogynistic nihilist.

Houellebecq’s novels have also at times seemed to have a prophetic quality, such as in the novel Platform, which ends (spoiler alert) with an attack on a tourist resort in Thailand by Muslim fundamentalists. The novel was published shortly before 9/11 and the Bali bombings a year later. Halfway into The Map and the Territory, the lead character, whose name is Houellebecq, is brutally murdered.

(Click to watch video.)

Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon delivered last Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the subject of leadership. Comparing what she argued are old and new models of leadership, Nixon stressed that qualities such as independence, lateral thinking and openness to the needs of others are key to leadership in a progressive society. She also acknowledged the reluctance of some to leave behind the comfort and security of militaristic, top-down command, a reluctance she attributed to a reluctance by the old guard to relinquish power.

Nixon pointed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard as an example of a new style of leader being judged on an outdated model. Dismissing the media’s undermining “voice of ridicule”, she argued that Gillard is dealing with “an incredibly complex system where she is in a minority government, having to make sure that a whole range of other people are a part of it”. This ridicule, she says, is borne from fear. Rather than being weak for capitulating to the ideas of others, though, Nixon praises leaders like Gillard and Obama for their strengths in consensus governance.

Image credit: Ingvar Kenne

Mark Mordue on why modern-day fatherhood is all about eating breakfast standing up.

It’s Father’s Day morning, the year 2011. No Glad Wrap in the house. Do you have any idea how that screws with dad’s main day of the year? Three kids, lunches to make and pack, no Glad Wrap! My day is in tatters, man. Ruination. It’s going be a big climb back after this kind of start, let me tell you.

The kids are up early. I notice on special sleep-in days like this they always wake up early. They’re excited. There are two different father’s day events at the two eldest kids schools. I’m a guest DJ at one. Which effectively means loading up my ipod with 70s rock, 80s post-punk pop and a few hip hop tunes and old country numbers, then I’m on my way to found my own groove nation.

Of course you try to be a crowd pleaser, but personal taste creeps in. At the last minute I get cold feet about the prospect of playing Nick Cave’s ‘No Pussy Blues’ at the school Fathers’ Day breakfast. What was amusing and irreverent last night when I put my ‘mixed tape’ (I’m so old) together now seems crude and likely to offend. Dear me – what to do?

I’ll swap it for Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s ‘Come Up and See Me, Make Me Smile’. I always remember one of my friends’ fathers accusing me of being a homosexual for liking that song when I was 12. I think it was because Harley wore mascara and a fur coat with no shirt on in the video clip, which seemed kinda cool to me at the time – not that I ever adopted the look for myself.

Anyway, back at Masterchef Central I use some disposable plastic containers – left over from takeaway Indian meals and rinsed clean – to pack the sandwiches in. Dads are genius improvisers like that. My partner is meanwhile trying to make sure the kids get dressed – and put their shoes on as well! Then we are finally out of our own private madhouse and on our way to a larger, school-organised one.

My DJ efforts prove to be somewhat frustrated as the hall stereo keeps getting turned off due to surges brought on by all the tea urns. So I stand beside the electrical mains switching the power on again every time it goes off. It strikes me this is not the safest way to celebrate Father’s Day, but damn it, I put David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ and Johnny Cash singing ‘Solitary Man’ on this mix, and whether the crowd wants it or not I am giving it to them. ‘Golden Years’ comes out a little like this: Golden ..ears, G..ears… Wah.” Long pause. “Wah.”

My partner has been co-opted to do the barbecue and has disappeared into a cloud of smoking bacon fat. I am amazed she can smile at all but she seems to be enjoying herself.

Image via terriseesthings/Flickr

Somehow my youngest son has attached himself to my leg, and is weeping and crying because he wants a bottle of strawberry milk from the canteen, which is still officially closed. Which means he cannot have that strawberry milk. The tears and screaming suggest he has been through a savage beating or received news of a death in the family.

I have to drag him across the stage where I am DJing in front of audience of about 100 other highly distracted dads and their families. Most of them are busy dealing with their own kids or trying to have a conversation over my annoying music, but I still feel my crying-son-attached-to-my-leg-and-being dragged-along look lacks the right aura of parental harmony and love that I am seeking to project. He finally lets me go and I make a break for it as he lays resentfully in a tantrum-ish heap.

I decide to get a bacon and egg roll off my partner and a coffee as well. What the heck. It’s 8am and I’m just a modern guy, as Iggy Pop used to sing. Every now and then as I walk around with breakfast in my hand – and isn’t modern fatherhood the art of having breakfast standing up? – I catch another father’s eye, and get some weird amused smile or a hard-working, stunned nod of the head.

Up on the stage the kids all start reading poems for their dads that are very hard to hear, then the whole event declines into a rambling multiple-choice quiz that no one ever wins. My partner takes off with our two youngest children to the next port of call, the Father’s Day celebration at my daughter’s school down the road. My son goes to his class. I’m left with his football and my ipod throbbing to Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ in an almost empty hall.

Outside the sky is grey as my hair, threatening rain that does not seem to come. I’m able to stop for a more solitary and calming coffee at a local café where what sounds like Johann Sebastian Bach is being piped through the stereo. It’s now 10am. And there is plenty of Father’s Day yet left to burn. I promise myself not to yell at the kids tonight when they bicker and harass me. All the time I sense the main game is tolerance, patience, listening, and more patience. It’s the lesson I keep having to re-learn every day.

I know the kids have surprises for me, cards they’ve made, presents they have picked up at the stalls being held at their respective schools. A key ring, a bottle opener, a bath flannel with a football team logo, maybe I will even score some red wine as well if I am lucky. I realize I can get some Glad Wrap at the shops on the way home, and feel a new mood of fatherly zen begin to descend over me. The static of the morning is still subsiding, and yet what I find I want – and need – all over again is my family around me once more. Though maybe not attached to my leg. Just to be safe, I’m thinking I’ll buy some strawberry milk as well anyway.

Mark Mordue is the 2010 Pascall Prize Australian Critic of the Year. He is currently working on a biography of Nick Cave.

“Prison is a place where one can meet the most extraordinary people,” according to Russian tycoon and billionaire jailbird Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to an Agence France Presse report published in The Australian, Khodorkovsky’s observation was made in the first of a series of chronicles of prison life he’s begun writing for Novoye Vremya, or New Times, magazine.

His column, called ‘Prison Folk’, will be about the inmates of a prison in the far-northern Russian republic of Karelia where Khodorkovsky, formerly one of the richest men in the world, has been incarcerated since the middle of the year. The first instalment is about a prisoner called Kolya, “who disembowelled himself and threw his intestines at guards for being set up for a crime he did not commit: grabbing a purse from an elderly woman.”

Khodorkovsky, whose life story seems lifted from a Russian fable, is in the middle of serving an eight year term for tax evasion. His oil company Yukos was the subject of litigation, and subsequent takeover, by the Russian government in 2003 in an action designed to signal the end of Russian gangster capitalism.

Russian history has been marked by viciously punitive prison regimes. Because writers have often been the target of official opprobrium, Russian literature has chronicled these regimes in detail. Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are the best-known chroniclers of the Russian prison system during the Soviet era.

The scale of the Russian penal system has led to the rise of a kind of ‘prison anthropology’, looking into the complex social systems that have evolved over time. Danzig Baldayev, a prison guard at St Petersburg’s notorious Kresty Prison for 33 years, documented this culture in the three-volume Encyclopedia of Russian Criminal Tattoos (here’s a preview via the book-design blog Brain Pickings).

“It’s been pretty pathetic all the way through,” said Tasmanian writer Geoffrey Dean, who passed away last week at the age of 80 after half a century of writing short stories. Dean was describing how unrewarding his literary career has proven to be in an ABC television interview promoting the release of a selection of his best short stories, Mysteries, Myths & Miracles by Gininderra Press. As an Australian short story specialist, making ends meet was always going to be a challenge for Dean, who worked in a variety of jobs as a result, including farmer, news cameraman, circus employee and used furniture salesman among them. He claimed these experiences enriched his writing.

Here’s a review of his short story collection, The Literary Lunch.

On his blog, Dean introduced himself to readers in this way: “I’ve published heaps of stories and won heaps of prizes and had heaps of acclaim throughout the fifty or so years that I’ve been writing short stories. I would like to say that I’ve also earned heaps of money and gained heaps of readers outside of my home state of Tasmania. But no, the strait is too wide to send across the message that good things happen in the quiet backwaters of this wonderful country. The little poem I wrote to myself last year sums it up quite well I think: In this long drought, a few drops of rain here and there, but never enough to moisten the soil and grow my literary garden.

“But then my main motivation wasn’t to be famous, or get rich. Both fame and money frighten me somewhat. I write short stories because I like them. I like reading a good short story and I enjoy above all other literary pursuits to write them. They suit my temperament. I like to get in and get out before the story looses [sic] its excitement. If I can’t write a story with a sense of excitement, then how can I expect a reader to be excited when reading it. The fact is I have a need to tell stories. I’ve been writing stories ever since I learnt to write. It’s probably a deep-seated neurosis, but hell, who cares, it keeps me happy.

“I find now it takes too long to publish a story in the conventional way today. It can take up to four or five years to battle your way through the heaps of pink slips that say: The editor regrets … and blah, blah, blah … It’s all too much hassle for someone at my age. I haven’t got the time or the patience to persist in the hard-copy world so I pass them into cyberspace, in the hope that they will be read immediately by someone somewhere who appreciates them before the virtual ink dries and the paper curls at the corners.”

Read more at a tribute page published by Roaring Forties Press.

Today we’re cross-posting a blog post written by Stephanie Honor Convery and published on the Melbourne Writers Festival blog. Stephanie takes a look at two Festival events looking at gender and feminism, and in this excerpt focuses on last night’s address by Sophie Cunningham on why feminism still has a long way to go.

Sophie Cunningham’s ‘A Long, Long Way To Go: Why We Still Need Feminism’ would have left you with the conviction that sexual inequality is indeed very real, and evident in statistic after sobering statistic.

In Australia, Cunningham explained, only 58% of women are in the workforce, compared to 78% of men. Only 54% of ASX200 companies have women in management roles, and only 10.7% of executive managers are women. 56% of law graduates are women, but only 25% of practicing lawyers over 40 are women, and those women in law suffer a 62% pay gap. The arts are nowhere near exempt from these kind of telling numbers. When the May issue of Esquire listed 75 books every man should read, only one woman made the cut. The 2009 and 2011 Miles Franklin shortlists were all male. Since the award began in 1957, it has been awarded 51 times. Out of those 51 awards, only 13 recipients have been women. In theatre, visual and fine arts, these trends are mirrored, if not worse. And one set of numbers Cunningham didn’t give: in the 16 years since the MWF instituted an opening night keynote address, that headlining festival role has been occupied only twice by a woman – by the same woman: Germaine Greer.

Read more.

Congratulations to Fiona McGregor, whose third novel Indelible Ink was announced winner of The Age Book of the Year Award last night at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival. Indelible Ink also won the fiction category, while Jim Davidson’s biography of historian Keith Hancock took out the gong in the non-fiction category and John Tranter won the poetry award for Starlight: 150 Poems (more information). Congratulations to the winners and shortlisted writers.

A new national writers' organisation with an ambitious agenda was launched at the Wheeler Centre last night. Writing Australia is a national organisation founded by a federation of five state-based writers' centres in Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT.

With funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, Writing Australia will coordinate a national program to support Australian writing and literature, raise the profile of local writers and their work and look for opportunities to promote these writers and their work overseas. The organisation has floated several initiatives it will pursue, including the development of a national writers' touring circuit, a national writers' conference, a residencies program, a web portal of resources for writers, and national strategic partnerships with other cultural organisations like the ABC and the National Library.

Writing Australia will be headed by former journalist and politician Mary Delahunty. She’s the author of Public Life: Private Grief.

A two-day conference being held tomorrow and Saturday as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival is taking a look at the impact of digital technologies and culture on the business and practice of news. ‘New News’ is a program of events – most of them at the Wheeler Centre – that will explore a dazzling variety of topics and feature some of Australia’s most highly respected journalists and media commentators.

Topics will include political journalism (here and here), science writing, universities and journalism, innovation, spin, journalists and trauma, ‘democratic’ news, rural affairs and sub-editors, among others.

Melbourne’s annual writers festival begins tonight and tomorrow with the festival’s two keynote events. Tonight, US writer Jonathan Franzen will speak on autobiographical fiction while tomorrow night the Orkestra of the Underground will perform a musical adaptation of Oscar-winning illustrator Shaun Tan’s book, The Arrival.

We’ve already covered one highlight of the festival – a visit from Argentinian novelist César Aira – but as always there are plenty more. Eliot Weinberger is one of America’s most distinguished literary voices. The poet, essayist, critic and translator has championed distinguished writing from Spanish and Chinese throughout his career and his review essays are regularly published in the New York Review of Books.

Charlotte Smith may live in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales but she is the curator of the Darnell collection, one of the world’s finest collections of antique clothing, footwear and accessories. She has a degree in art history and lectures on the history of fashion. She’ll be speaking on fashion in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Cop this for a CV: the straight-ish Jon Jon Goulian is an NYU law graduate, a former assistant to the editor of the New York Review, scion of the New York intellectual establishment, on the list of Rolling Stone’s Hottest Breakout Stars of 2011, a former hiphop recording artist – indeed, “perhaps the only former hip-hop recording artist who is also a member of New York’s delicate and droopy intelligentsia-in-training”, proclaims the New York Observer. The Observer profile concludes, “taken together, he amounts to a most bewildering weirdo.” Although he was a celebrity before putting pen to paper, Goulian has just published a memoir of androgeny, The Man in the Grey Flannel Skirt.

Many music fans will be familiar with the work of Simone Felice, one of a trio of brothers from the Catskill mountains in upstate New York that founded the band the Felice Brothers. Simone was their drummer but has since left it to star in the noted duo, the Duke and the King, and to concentrate on his solo career. Simone’s also a writer – a novelist and a poet – and his novel Black Jesus has just been published in Australia. In one of his three festival appearances, he’ll be at the Corner Hotel alongside Kim Salmon and Laura Jean in an event called ‘Lyrical’, exploring storytelling through song.

And we’re looking forward to delving into Drawn From Life, a free newspaper featuring graphic art and comics by leading local and international illustrators, cartoonists and graphic artists, edited by Oslo Davis. They’ll be distributed at train stations tomorrow morning and will be stocked at festival venues until 4 September.

An Irish author has, by dint of sheer chutzpah, managed a way to be nominated for a literary award before his book has been published. Two weekends ago, Julian Gough posted a plea for help on his website under the title, ‘Help save civilisation by reading a funny book’. Gough asked readers to read and review his forthcoming comic novel Jude in London for the Guardian’s annual Not the Booker Prize.

Publishers are usually understandably loathe to distribute copies of a book before its publication date for intellectual property reasons – which is where Gough’s “save the civilisation” angle came in. Gough claimed that by reading a copy of his book publication, readers would be undermining capitalism.

The Not the Booker Prize is, in Gough’s own words, “the most entertaining prize in the literary calendar; an annual online flame-war-slash-literary-debate that can be very helpful in drawing attention to unusual books. (The prize itself is a mug, worth about £1.50. But the glory is incalculable!)” The only catch is that, as Jude in London hasn’t been published yet and could only be shortlisted if nominated by a reader by last Wednesday. Gough offered to send readers a digital copy of his book. He asked them in return to write a 150-word review of the book before the deadline lapsed.

If Gough’s publisher had reservations about the stunt, they’ll have dissipated by now: it seems to worked a treat. Not only was Gough’s book nominated for the prize – it is now the clear frontrunner for the prize.

The meteorologists are forecasting some glorious weather over the next few days and no doubt this weekend many Melburnians will be heading seaward for the first glimpse of spring for the year. If for you that means heading west, we recommend popping into Aireys Inlet for their Aireys Festival of Words, which runs for three days beginning today. Among the highlights (even if we do say so ourselves) will be a Wheeler Centre-partnered event tomorrow afternoon beginning at 2:30pm. Funny guys Tony Wilson and Adam Zwar will be chatting about tabloid newspapers and the endless comic fodder they provide us – an apt topic given recent events in the UK. Shameless self-promotion aside, the program is packed full of interesting people, including Tony Birch, Alice Pung and the puzzling David Astle.

Shakespeare’s House, Stratford-on-Avon, from the Hume Photograph Collection, University of Queensland

Have you ever visited the house of a favourite writer? By which we don’t mean a favourite writer who’s still living in the house, who happens to be a friend or a partner or a lover or even a housemate. We mean one of those houses of a now-dead writer, a famous writer whose abode one way or another has been transformed into a museum, like the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Vermont, the Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris or Shakespeare’s various residences. If you’re anything like April Bernard at the New York Review blog you enter the famous writer’s house and think to yourself, Why am I here?

“Here’s what I hate about Writers’ Houses: the basic mistakes. That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder. ”

For several years, publisher Allen & Unwin has accepted manuscript pitches from aspiring writers every Friday with a service it aptly called the Friday Pitch. Now Pan Macmillan has inaugurated its own version of the Friday Pitch – Manuscript Monday. Pan Macmillan will consider pitches for commercial and literary fiction and non-fiction, children’s books and young adult fiction, so long as they are emailed on a Monday between 10am and 4pm. From November, the publisher will no longer accept hard copy submissions at all – thus saving several forests as well as uncovering tomorrow’s bestsellers.

The Brisbane Writers Festival has just announced its program, and it features names including Jonathan Franzen (on the back of his appearance in Melbourne), Ann Patchett, Philip Pullman (via Skype) and Korea’s Kyung-sook Shin to fiction favourites including Anita Shreve and Australia’s own Kate Grenville and Gail Jones. The festival will take place from 7 to 11 September.