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Newly published authors are among those whose livelihoods have been impacted by the COVID lockdowns of the last two years, writes Mark Rubbo, managing director of independent Australian book retailer Readings. Bookshop exposure is integral in building an author’s profile, and is something many new authors have missed out on recently, with people staying at home because of restrictions imposed as a result of the pandemic.

For most first-time authors, exposure in bookshops is very important in establishing a market for a book, be it a chance encounter, a recommendation or a purchase triggered by some form of publicity. If the book is any good, then word of mouth builds a more sustainable demand. Many of the books released in the past two years risk becoming Covid orphans.

Veronica Gorrie has been named winner of the 2022 Victorian Prize for Literature, for her 2021 book Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience, a memoir which recounts her childhood, and service as an Aboriginal officer with the police force in both her home state of Victoria, and Queensland.

Fans of riotously popular word game Wordle need not fret — for now at least — about the daily challenge running out of five letter words. According to WordFinderX, there are over 158,000 five-letter English language words, depending which dictionary you refer to. That’s several centuries of daily puzzles.

On the other extreme, we are told there are a mere 5,350 words only available to word games. Even so, that makes for fourteen and a half year’s worth of units of language. Plenty of time to worry about what to do next. Let the fun continue.

Ten books to read in February, put together by Jason Steger, books editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. A nice mix of Australian and international titles, fiction and non-fiction, including The Furies by Mandy Beaumont, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, by Wendy Mitchell, and Found, Wanting, by Natasha Sholl.

The National Pleasure Audit is presently open to Australians aged eighteen and over. Conducted by Dr Desirée Kozlowski, a researcher at Southern Cross University, the audit aims to find out what brings joy — by whatever means — to people. Participation is anonymous, so anything goes, though you can submit an email address if you wish to be sent the results of the audit.

Australian writer and poet Declan Fry hosts a panel discussion with Tara June Winch, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Claire G. Coleman, about their writing processes, on Sunday 20 March 2022, from 4:15PM until 5:15PM.

It’s incredible to believe that Federal Government investment in Australian literature has declined by forty percent in the last ten years. It is something the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) hopes to redress in a pre-budget submission to the Australian Treasury. Direct grants to authors, and an increase in public lending rights scheme, are two key areas of interest to the ASA:

• Direct authors’ grants: the development of a Commonwealth Fellowships and Grants program which includes a focus on First Nations storytelling, designed to fuel the talent pipeline and build the creative economy of the future.
• A 20% increase to the Federal Government’s Lending Rights Budget to fund the expansion of the public lending rights (PLR) and educational lending rights (ELR) schemes to include digital formats (ebooks and audiobooks), which would modernise the schemes and reflect the reality of library holdings.

Word game Wordle, created by Josh Wardle, and hugely popular with — among others — the book-reading posse, plus one or two game developers looking for a piece of the word-game-gone-viral action, has been bought by the New York Times.

Created by a Reddit engineer and launched in October, Wordle gives players just six guesses to determine a five-letter word that changes every day. The soothing daily puzzle has become a hit since its launch, quickly attracting hundreds of thousands, then millions, of players. Social media posts about its game of the day have become ubiquitous, along with screenshots of the game’s distinctive grid.

Update: on the topic of Wordle “copies”, instructions for installing the official real version of the game, rather than an imitation.

It’s a funny old game cricket, some days a player’s skill sees them soar to heights not seen before, other day’s fortune roundly turns on even the best. Then there’s Roy Cooper, a police sergeant who’s been a member of the rural Australian Penguin Hill Cricket Club for years. He’s never scored a century, nor for that matter, gone much passed double figures.

Nor has he ever taken a wicket, let alone a hat-trick, or a ten wicket haul. But as local schoolgirl Cassie Midwinter discovers, Roy has a claim to fame, one seemingly overlooked by the statistics mad doyens of the game: he has not once been dismissed while playing. After decades at the crease, Roy has never been bowled, stumped, caught, nor run-out.

It is a feat Cassie brings to the attention of a renowned cricket writer known as Don Garrett, who thinks the national men’s cricket team could benefit from Roy’s talents. Australia are being trounced by the West Indies in the 1984 summer test series, and Don sets about bringing Roy’s achievement to the notice of the team selectors, in Cooper Not Out (published by Penguin Books Australia, 18 January 2022), by Melbourne based writer and journalist Justin Smith.

Will the unthinkable happen? Will a life-long club player find himself pacing onto the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in a bid to reverse the fortunes of the men’s test team? It might seem like a pipe dream, but as they say, it’s a funny old game. But Roy isn’t the only one with unnoticed accomplishments, and there’s much more to Don, the sports writer, than meets the eye.