Hannah Kent is a rising star in Australia’s literary firmament and the release of Burial Rites last month in Australia, and in the next few months in Britain and the US, is the major reason for her ascent. Literary critic Stephen Romei said Kent’s book was “the most talked about Australian debut novel in years”.
Four years after finding a dead man and a baby washed up on Janus Island off Western Australia Tom Sherbourne sits brooding in prison. A memory flares from his time as the island’s lighthouse keeper and he recalls, “The woomph of the oil vapour igniting into brilliance at the touch of his match. The rainbows
Earlier this year, my story “Shooting Star” was shortlisted by judge Amanda Lohrey for the Carmel Bird Long Story Award and I was pleased to read part of it at the award ceremony in Canberra on March 7. Twelve stories, including mine, will be published in coming months as Amanda Lohrey Selects … a series
In Questions of Travel, Michelle de Kretser’s globe-trotting protagonist, Laura Fraser, stuffs her backpack with literature, boards a flight and later muses over “the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere [that] was opposed to books”. Recently, I lugged de Kretser’s large, hardback version of this outstanding novel through Europe and the UK for five weeks and
At this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival The Loft contained bookcases, each with colour coordinated books, which the City of Sydney Library offered for free: “Find a book you’d like to own … It’s yours to keep and carry home.” The books themselves bore stickers: “Take me home and read your heart out.” The library obviously
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