This sonorous collection had me switched on from London to Singapore while all the other cattle-class travellers snoozed dopily into the wee hours. What a superb book of short stories—and one I found particularly delightful due to its absence of tricks. The tonal similarity of the stories appealed to me. Meaning: If there is such
Authors Gabrielle Lord and Walter Mason launched Carmel Bird’s My Hearts Are Your Hearts and The Michael McGirr Selects Series for Spineless Wonders on July 25 at Berkelouw Books, Leichhardt, Sydney. My story, ‘We’re All Travellers Here’, won the 2014 Carmel Bird Award, which was presented by Carmel Bird on the night. I was not
I first walked on the bare rocks of the Burren on the West Coast of Ireland before I knew I had Irish heritage and the tug of that landscape has been more intense than any other. Some of the most powerful scenes in The Green Road, by Irish author Anne Enright, are set in and
Station Eleven might well be the book for readers who gave up on The Road because the post-apocalyptic world Cormac McCarthy painted was so austere they couldn’t see past the misery to engage with the issues this fabulous novel raised. Emily St. John Mandel’s apocalypse is a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the
‘What is it in us—what urge to lose ourselves in the otherness of things—that leads us so insistently to seek out encounters with paintings, plays, poems, novels, works of sculpture, dance, music?’ asks the Australian author David Malouf in his essay ‘Questions on the Way to the Exhibition’. This essay appears in Being There, the
‘You are what you read,’ writes Malcolm Knox in The Simple Act of Reading. ‘By digesting books I am creating myself.’ Knox is one of 21 writers in this anthology who explain how reading has shaped their identities and writing. And here’s my A to Z of why Debra Adelaide’s handpicked homage to reading should
A friend wants me to take a trip to Bunyah to visit the internationally lauded Australian poet Les Murray on his home turf. In the meantime, let’s hit the road with Murray’s latest poetry collection Waiting for the Past and see what vistas open up along the way … What sort of road trip are
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
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
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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