Heading into the holidays? Here’s a handy list of favourites I read in 2024 to guide your reading. The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes – This is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’ My
Listen up … I loved these poems when I read them during the last half of 2024. I hope you also enjoy their different music. ‘Object Permanence’ by Madeleine Cravens The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole / time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. / Everyone I love
Some of the best short stories I read in the second half of 2024 included circus mammas, love, grief and philosophy, and a prickly character called Pearl who curls into an armchair ‘like cream’. I hope you lap them up! ‘The Mothers and The Girls’ by Saba Sams In Send Nudes Saba Sams immerses us
When it comes to naming extinct animals, most of us would probably know the dodo and the woolly mammoth. But how many of the over 900 species classified as extinct since 1500, and the over 44,000 species threatened with extinction, could we actually name? The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals by Sami Bayly can help
Australia is ‘further along the trajectory of climate grief’ than most other countries, according to Irish author Caoilinn Hughes, who says this may be one reason her latest novel The Alternatives has received a good reception here. Hughes was in Sydney ahead of her appearance at the Byron Bay Writers Festival (August 9-11). Her clear-eyed
Here are some poems from the first half of 2024 that shone a light on a diversity of subjects for me in their examination of grief, impermanence, environmental destruction and more. ‘Given to Rust’ by Vievee Francis Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved / through the gap in my teeth
These short stories interrogate the mysteriousness of human life and relationships and they’re some of the best stories I read in the first half of 2024. ‘Sky Bar’ by Katherine Heiny In ‘Sky Bar’ from Katherine Heiny’s collection Games and Rituals we meet Fawn and discover there is nothing left for her in her home
Moody, broody and wild … precisely how I love short stories to be. And these are some of the best I read in 2023. ‘Anyone Can Do It’ by Manuel Muñoz Muñoz creates a mood in his latest collection of stories which I love and ‘Anyone Can Do It’ is especially evocative. The stories in
In 1980 when Australian author Michelle de Kretser read Shirley Hazzard’s new novel The Transit of Venus she wondered what all the fuss was about. Twenty years later she reread it, and ‘the sensation came, like a blow to the breastbone,’ from the first page, ‘the shock of the great’. This anecdote from Brigitta Olubas’s
‘In the city, nature can feel far away – but is it?’ This question lies at the heart of Naturopolis – a new, creative non-fiction picture book for readers in years K to 6. The book’s elegant, double page spreads both describe and explore the natural phenomena found in ‘the great grey city’ and children
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