Monthly Archive for: ‘May, 2015’

‘The Golden Age’ is magnetic and lights up the ’50s

At the Sydney Writers Festival last week, Tegan Bennett Daylight said The Golden Age was the best Australian novel she’d read in a long time. I also loved this superb story set in a children’s polio convalescent home and hope it scoops this year’s Miles Franklin Award to be announced on June 23. Don’t be

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My story ‘We’re All Travellers Here’ out this week

This week Spineless Wonders released my award-winning story ‘We’re All Travellers Here’, the first in its series of 12 long eStories selected by Michael McGirr. The story won the 2014 Carmel Bird Award announced in January 2015. Award judge, Michael McGirr, said the story was ‘a terrific achievement which makes great use of cultural history

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Four poets and a poetic book about the bush

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is done and dusted for another year but you can find lasting traces (in the form of photos and grabs) on A Bigger Brighter World’s Facebook page. You’ll find Don Watson speaking with Eleanor Hall about his book The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia, a poetic tour de force,

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S is for a short history of the golden age of the simple act of reading

A Bigger Brighter World has been pushing through crowds and shuffling along queues with sticky-noted books at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this week. Pictured here are the stars of the second day at the Carrington Hotel stage of the Varuna and Sydney Writers’ Festival. For more photos of the authors, pop over to our Facebook

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McGarry channels Dr Smith to enflesh the villainous Iago

Tim McGarry’s recent performance of Mark O’Flynn’s short story ‘Iago’ at the monthly literary soiree in Sydney that is Little Fictions was ‘Part jester part Shakespearean tragic’—to steal the words of Spineless Wonders’ Publisher Bronwyn Mehan. But how do actors like McGarry enflesh a character when they read another person’s story to a live audience

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Angst over a hanky? O’Flynn’s Iago’s fast and feisty

‘All that fuss over a snot rag. Get over it.’ … please discuss. Why did Australian author Mark O’Flynn feel free to tamper with the Iago from Othello, who some say is Shakespeare’s most evil villain? This Q&A with O’Flynn takes you behind the scenes of how he wrote this brilliant story. Next week, I’ll

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