This Australian classic follows the lives of two Australian orphans, Caro and Grace Bell, who move
to England in search of a better life. It’s a heartbreaking tale of unrequited passionate longing.Mi…
Born to a world without welcome, Isobel observes it warily – an alien trying to pass for a native.
She’s more at ease with imaginary friends than the flesh-and-blood people she meets.Cate Kennedy…
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
Our fabulous double bills are back – bringing you three big nights of international writers, presented back-to-back.From genre-bending fiction bestsellers to young adult authors with cult…
Les Murray is undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest living poets – and an international literary legend.The New Yorker has described him as ‘now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading …
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
We can’t wait to get back on the road again – bringing some of our favourite writers to regional Victoria. We’ll be packing up the car with books and authors, travelling from country to coast … and m…
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
J.M. Coetzee is one of the world’s most prized literary treasures – and we’re lucky enough to have him living right here in Australia.The first author to win the Booker Prize twice, he won the Nobel …
J.M. Coetzee is one of the world’s most prized literary treasures – and we’re lucky enough to have him living right here in Australia.The first author to win the Booker Prize twice, he won the Nobel …
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
A.M. Homes
Event · Thu, 28 Feb 2013
A.M. Homes’ latest novel, May We Be Forgiven, began life as a short story commissioned by Zadie Smith. Salman Rushdie calls it ‘flat-out amazing’. Jeanette Winterson is a fan.Homes has long had a…
In this edition of our Texts in the City series, focussing on VCE English texts, join Tony Birch and Josephine Rowe explore the secrets and tensions in Raymond Carver’s 1976 short story collection…
Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our experts deemed unmissable Australian reading. This year, we invite you on a brand new, leisurely…
We’ve created an Australian Classics book club, just for you – with special writerly guests each month.Last year’s hugely popular Australian Literature 101 set the scene by introducing ten texts our …
Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and…
Neil Gaiman
Event · Thu, 24 Jan 2013
Neil Gaiman is a writer with a rock star following. He has a reputation for reinventing genres – and for following his imagination wherever it leads.He’s written everything from journalism to…
We share five of our favourite links, articles and issues from around the internet this week.George Monbiot on climate change and Australia’s heatwave‘Climate change denial is almost a national…
By Billie TumarkinFollowing Christopher Bantick’s article arguing that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is inappropriate for students due to an incident of sex with a minor, the…
David Shields has been hailed as a writing revolutionary. His wildly inventive ‘manifesto’ Reality Hunger, a broadside against the contemporary novel, has been welcomed with open arms by novelists…
There’s a huge public appetite for non-fiction storytelling in all its forms, from literary and political essays to the shelf-filling genre of memoir, and the much-maligned reality TV.This is a…
Geordie Williamson, one of our leading literary critics, approaches books and writing with the ardour of an enthusiast – though he’s also alarmed at the way classic Australian literature is falling o…
by Stephanie Honor ConveryIn the wake of the book-reviewers-for-hire furore, Stephanie Honor Convery examines the scandal’s context: a proliferation of ‘consumer review spaces’ and a shift from the…
Q: What’s as Australian as Vegemite and as American as apple pie? A: The new issue of McSweeney’s, the US literary journal so hip it should be wearing black-framed glasses and riding a bicycle.…
Q: What’s as Australian as Vegemite and as American as apple pie? A: The new issue of McSweeney’s, the US literary journal so hip it should be wearing black-framed glasses and riding a bicycle.…
Is Australia’s literary culture too nice? Too clubbish? Is our critical culture based too much on who you know, and not enough on what you know? Writer and lecturer Emmett Stinson argues that it is…
In this week’s Friday High Five, we celebrate what would have been Dickens' 200th year with a look at five pieces from around the web that look at Dickens' legacy, or use it as a springboard for…
Delia Falconer is a Sydney-based novelist, essayist and writer of short stories; she’s also one of Australia’s finest critics. Her latest book, Sydney, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s and…
In person, Jeanette Winterson has a somehow otherworldly appearance. Small and lithe, her short hair curling over her ears and at the nape of her neck, she resembles an elf or a pixie.Light-footed…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?With major…
In this special video-only edition of Texts in the City, the Wheeler Centre’s Jenny Niven looks at Collected Poems of Gwen Harwood with Chris Wallace-Crabbe – writer, Australian Poetry chair and…
The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel, opens with a look at the bookshelves of his heroine, English literature major Madeleine. It’s stacked with nineteenth-century romantic novels…
Some memoirs are less about the subject than about meeting the writer on the page. New York composer Joshua Cody’s [sic], ostensibly about being a young cancer patient, is one of those memoirs. Cody …
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Hannah Kent, deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, has spent time living and writing in Iceland, the setting for her forthcoming debut novel, over the past eight years.The Australian visit of one of…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? If there is, Hilary…
In this instalment of Texts in the City, Ruby J Murray and Dickens scholar Dr Grace Moore look at Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and its complex political undertones.
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
In this major new weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their…
The shortlist has been announced for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, the UK-based literary prize for the best book for a woman writer, now in its 17th year.Contenders are:Half Blood Blues by Esi E…
In this major new weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Rebecca Starford, managing editor of Kill Your Darlings, writes back to Geordie Williamson’s Long View essay on Australian rural writing and wonders: what does this trend of privileging the rural…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? In this major new…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
No matter how compelling a novel or a film might be, if you have to study it, there’s always the risk you’ll end up hating it. Not any more! A gift to VCE students, their teachers (and of course…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
In this weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their responses and…
Murakami pieFans and sceptics alike will enjoy this chuckle-worthy breakdown of a typical Murakami novel. there’s cats, classical music, bizarre dream sequences and jazz. It’s all there; the only…
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Novelist Alex Miller and historian Jim Davidson mark the first anniversary of the untimely passing of their friend Hazel Rowley. In the space of just four books, Rowley established herself as one of …
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all? In the debut event of …
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?Australians are…
Janette Turner Hospital, one of Australia’s most admired writers, speaks on a lifetime of writing – and teaching – literature. She notes similarities between America’s South and Australia’s…
We began our Monday morning at the Wheeler Centre with a bit of a giggle, after stumbling on a very funny website that brings literary characters to (startlingly) real life.The creator of The…
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…
Ship Happens
Dailies · Tue, 17 Jan 2012
When Captain Cat beseeched his deceased lover Rosie Probert to “let me shipwreck in your thighs” in Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, we truly doubt he meant anything resembling the fate of the Costa…
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…
Hello Dolly
Dailies · Wed, 23 Nov 2011
The Dolly Parton show is in town and so it’s a good occasion to pay tribute to the veteran country singer’s work to promote literacy among poor kids. Since 1996, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library…
It’s the 48th anniversary of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The New York Times has published a short film by noted documentarian Errol Morris called The Umbrella Man, in w…
In the online world, science fiction and fantasy, thrillers and romance rule supreme. Much-maligned genre fiction is seemingly better placed to survive in the new world order than prestigious…
In the online world, science fiction and fantasy, thrillers and romance rule supreme. Much-maligned genre fiction is seemingly better placed to survive in the new world order than prestigious…
In a Crikey report published earlier this week, Guy Rundle lamented the fall from grace of the Man Booker Prize. Rundle compared the prize’s first jury in 1969, consisting of the standard-bearers of …
Simon Leys‘ cultural and political commentary has spanned four decades, with no corner of the arts escaping his sharp eye and acerbic wit. Since moving to Australia in 1970 he has become one of the c…
The inaugural Meanjin Tournament is a literary stoush like no other. The venerable literary journal pits classics against each other to determine one true candidate for the Great Australian Novel.The…
Iconic Australian literature doesn’t come much more iconic than For the Term of His Natural Life, the quintessential convict tale. We remember its author: journalist, poet and novelist Marcus…
This blog excerpt is a cross-post of a piece by writer and RMIT Publishing marketing assistant Amy Han on the Informit Literature and Culture collection. The full blog can be read at the SPUNC…
Image of Icelandic sulphur pools courtesy Stuck in Customs/Flickr
Iceland’s capital city Reykjavik has been designated a City of Literature by the United Nations…
The Miles Franklin Award will be conferred on one of three shortlisted nominees tonight at the State Library of Victoria, the second year it hasn’t been hosted by Sydney’s Mitchell Library as the…
