Australian Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckerman has won a Windham-Campbell prize—a US literary prize worth US$165,000 (A$215,000). This is wonderful news. Eckerman is a marvelous poet and her most recent poetry collection Inside my Mother is a tender and moving work: largely a love song to the mother that she was separated from for 30 years
On the opening page of The Boy Behind the Curtain Tim Winton makes a confession. At 13 he would stand behind a Terylene curtain in a fibro house in Campbell Road, Albany, and aim his father’s .22 Lithgow at passers-by. A lad in his book The Turning does the same thing. Neither of them shoots.
I read a cartload of fabulous books this year and it was difficult to choose the highlights. But here they are! Read this list in conjunction with my blog post ‘EOFY (Part 2) – the rest of this year’s fiction that got away’ [hotlink] for an even more comprehensive list of great books I appreciated
Finally, I give you EOFY (Part 2). This is fiction I’ve read in 2016 but not blogged about (until now). There’s an array of titles here for you to seek out in the New Year. Enjoy! You can also read EOFY (Part 1) here. The Salamanders by William Lane Peregrine is a self-absorbed artist who
At first glance this moving children’s picture book seems to retell the journey of the flight into Egypt by Joseph and Mary after Jesus is born. Soon we see it’s a more contemporary tale of a family forced from their home to trudge across a desert in search of a new place to settle safely.
Throughout 2016 I’ve selected and posted lines from the 16 best poems I’ve read during the month. In this post I’m giving you the best of the best of these poems and lines—plus quite a few that didn’t feature in my original series for one reason or another. 1. ‘After a Death’ by Tomas Tranströmer
Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I chose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you got to enjoy a taste of them too. Sixteen poems a month
Stephanie Owen Reeder’s book Lennie the Legend: Solo to Sydney by Pony won the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books in the 2016 Children’s Book Council Awards. In this Q&A she describes her three-year journey with Lennie—the boy who rode a horse on his own from Victoria to Sydney to be at the opening of
Author and editor Sue McCreery’s New Year’s resolution in 2015 was to write a story a day for a year. Loopholes, her delectable new collection of microfiction released on December 1 by Spineless Wonders, is the result. ‘Can’t you order a tender eye?’ a woman asks of her partner in ‘Monoculus’—and it was from this
Some of these stories were published this year but some are much older. All are my top picks from the stories I read in 2016. 1. ‘The Quiet’ by Carys Davies This story, set in a remote Australia, is breathtaking. A young wife reluctantly invites her neighbour into her home and the consequences are both
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