What’s the worst thing that could happen to a rock star? It might be waking up one day and discovering they’re no longer as famous as they once were. For some, the awakening can be rude, as was the case for American musician Suzanne Vega.
Accustomed to her record company supplying a limousine to convey her between airport and home, Vega was forced to hail a taxi on returning from an ill-fated tour in 1990, after realising she no longer qualified for the perk.
Similar fates, it seems, have befallen other who were once household names, such as Kevin Rowland, of Dexys Midnight Runners, Terence Trent D’Arby, now known as Sananda Maitreya, and Bill Drummond of The KLF.
What’s interesting though, encouraging even, is most of these musicians, and likely many others who fell out of the limelight decades ago, are still recording and performing. Carrying on, sans the hype.
If being a musician is in someone’s DNA, what need is there for mass adulation? It’s all about the music, isn’t it?
This is the eighth year of the prestigious Richell Prize and once again entries are open to unpublished writers of adult fiction and adult narrative non-fiction. Writers do not need to have a full manuscript at the time of submission, though they must intend to complete one. The Prize will be judged on the first three chapters of the submitted work, along with a synopsis outlining the direction of the proposed work and detail about how the author’s writing career would benefit from winning the Prize.
The Richell Prize was established in 2015 in memory of Matt Richell, the former CEO of the Australian operation of Hachette Publishing, who died in 2014. The longlist for the prize will be published on Monday 5 September 2022.
Thinking of yourself as another person, in the same sort of way Bruce Wayne thinks of himself as the Batman, may be surprisingly empowering. You don’t need to imagine you’re a superhero though, even assigning yourself a pseudonym may be sufficient.
Although the embodiment of a fictional persona may seem like a gimmick for pop stars, new research suggests there may be some real psychological benefits to the strategy. Adopting an alter ego is an extreme form of ‘self-distancing’, which involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to view a situation more dispassionately.
“Self-distancing gives us a little bit of extra space to think rationally about the situation,” says Rachel White, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York State. It allows us to rein in undesirable feelings like anxiety, increases our perseverance on challenging tasks, and boosts our self-control.
Some notable figures in this category include Colombia’s first Nobel Prize of Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez, the pioneer of Japanese modern literature Ichiyo Higuchi and Turkish writer Fatma Aliye Topuz, who is known as the first female author in the Islamic world. Writers can give voice to a place, time, and culture in a way that can resonate and instill a sense of shared identity among citizens, perhaps making them such a popular choice to feature on banknotes.
We all know the feeling. You’re literally five seconds into reading article on a website, and a popup screen is asking if you’d like to subscribe to their newsletter. NO THANKS. I just want to read the article and never come back again.
It’s infuriating. That’s why this website is so… boring, people come here looking for information and I serve it up, no fuss, no drama, no damn popups.
Submissions for the 2022 Deutsche Bank Fellowship for First Nations Film Creatives are open until Friday 29 April 2022. The fellowship is open to Australian based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander film creatives in any discipline within the local film and television industry.
Now in its second year, the Deutsche Bank Fellowship is a grant for Australian First Nations film creatives launched by Sydney Film Festival and Deutsche Bank in 2021. The winning Fellow in 2022 will be awarded a $20,000 grant to further develop their skills through international placement or other professional development.
Last call for entries for the 2022 Newcastle Short Story Award, which close this Monday, 25 April. Works of no more than two thousand words by Australian citizens or permanent residents aged eighteen or over, are eligible for inclusion.
Groundskeeping (published by Allen & Unwin/Faber Fiction, March 2022) is the debut novel of New York City based American author Lee Cole, is the story of a perhaps forbidden, and likely mismatched love, set on the campus of a university in the American state of Kentucky.
Eager to clean up his act after his troubled early twenties, Owen has returned to Kentucky to take a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, one which allows him to enrol on their writing course. It’s there that he meets Alma, a Writer-in-Residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn’t – a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, and published success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma, from a supportive, liberal family of Bosnian immigrants, struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with his own family and home.
The Australian chapter of Sisters in Crime — an international networking association for women who write crime and mystery novels — celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in Melbourne, on Saturday 23 April 2022. When the group first formed in the inner Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, only five crime titles written by Australian women were published in 1991.
The Davitt Awards — established by the Melbourne chapter in 2001, which recognises the work of Australian women crime writers — is perhaps the best gauge of how much has changed in three decades. One hundred and sixty titles have been nominated for the 2022 prize, sixty of which are debut works.
The Davitts were named after English born Australian author Ellen Davitt, who wrote Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush in 1865, believed to be the first crime title published by an Australian woman. Winners of the Davitts will be announced later this year, in August or September.
On Sydney’s urban fringe, two young women battle for a better life in the underground world of competitive street dance. Patricia, Romanian-born and hanging out for a visa, is a breakdancer. Gabi, of Chilean-Samoan heritage, pops with power. Both dream of escaping the rough hand they’ve been dealt. Will a win at Australia’s biggest dance competition Destructive Steps – in which 60 contestants compete in the preliminary rounds – be their golden ticket? Or will the external pressures of financial hardship and volatile relationships stop them from even reaching the dancefloor?
