disassociated

Sydney based author and podcaster Nicholas Wasiliev, and host of Booktopia’s podcast, Tell Me What To Read, speaks to Evelyn Araluen, Lee Lai, Eunice Andrada, Jennifer Down, and Anwen Crawford, who are five of the six authors to have work shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

Writer’s on a tight deadline might disagree, but some physicists are beginning to believe that time may not exist. It’s a heady concept that there’s no such thing as lunch at one o’clock, because there’s no such thing as time, but when scientists talk about time, it’s on a cosmic scale, not a human one, says Dr Sam Baron of the Australian Catholic University, writing for The Conversation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many physicists became dissatisfied with string theory and came up with a range of new mathematical approaches to quantum gravity. One of the most prominent of these is loop quantum gravity, which proposes that the fabric of space and time is made of a network of extremely small discrete chunks, or “loops”. One of the remarkable aspects of loop quantum gravity is that it appears to eliminate time entirely. Loop quantum gravity is not alone in abolishing time: a number of other approaches also seem to remove time as a fundamental aspect of reality.

The absence of time in this context though may account for discrepancies in some of the theories that scientists use to understand the universe, such as general relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

If you’re a writer with a deadline you simply cannot afford to miss, then the Manuscript Writing Cafe, in Koenji, a district in the Japanese capital Tokyo, is the place for you. Upon arrival writers inform management of their writing goal for the day, be it a five-thousand word article, a couple of chapters of a novel, or a few blog posts.

Everyone in the cafe is working on a manuscript with an imminent deadline. This unique sense of tension like studying for an exam in a library will really stimulate your creative work!

Every hour a staff member will come along and check on your progress, and gently prod you if necessary. But here’s the thing, you will not be allowed to leave the cafe until you’ve finished what you set out to do. I’m not sure exactly how strictly that dictate is enforced, but not being able to go home might be pretty good motivation to meet your deadline.

The 2022 Australian Book Design Awards shortlist, which can be viewed here (PDF), was announced last week. The awards celebrate the best of Australian book design, and the winners will be named at a ceremony taking place at The Craft & Co in Melbourne, on Friday 3 June 2022.

The Australian federal election has been called for Saturday 21 May 2022. But election day isn’t entirely about having a say in who gets to govern Australia for the next three years, it’s also synonymous with the sausage sizzle.

While not a feature at every polling booth in Australia — they were only present at about one-third of booths in the 2013 election — partaking of a barbequed sausage after voting seems to be all that voters can talk about.

To get in the spirit though, Twitter has bought back the democracy sausage emoji, and members using any of seven election related hashtags in tweets will see the emoji appended to them. And here, listed below, are all the Twitter hashtags for the Australian democracy sausage:

• #Auspol
• #AusVotes
• #AusVotes2022
• #AusVotes22
• #DemocracySausage
• #MyFirstDemocracySausage
• #SausageSizzle

And if you’re searching for polling booths selling fund-raising democracy sausages on election day, bookmark the Democracy Sausage website.

Not content with a nine-percent stockholding in Twitter, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made an offer to buy all shares in the social networking service. His intention is to take the company private so he can enact many of the changes he says are necessary for Twitter’s future.

His offer of US$54.20 per share values Twitter at some US$43 billion, meaning Musk would either need to borrow the money, or sell some of his Tesla shares, to complete the purchase. Musk is the largest shareholder in Tesla, owning about seventeen percent of the stock.

But CEOs selling down shares in their own company can make other investors nervous, as it sometimes signals difficult times ahead. Watch this space. I’m waiting to see what happens.

The Opera House, written by Sydney based author and journalist Peter Fitzsimons, and published by Hachette Australia, takes a behind the scenes look at the design and construction of the Sydney Opera House, one of the most recognisable buildings in the world.

On a sacred site on the land of the Gadigal people, Tubowgule, a place of gathering and storytelling for over 60,000 years, now sits the Sydney Opera House. It is a breathtaking building recognised around the world as a symbol of modern Australia. Along with the Taj Mahal and other World Heritage sites, it is celebrated for its architectural grandeur and the daring and innovation of its design. But this stunning house on what is now called Bennelong Point also holds many sorrows, secrets and scandals.

Fitzsimons also asks a question that’s perhaps overshadowed by statue of the building itself, and the dispute between Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect who drew up the original building plans, and the NSW state government:

How the hell did 1950s Sydney, surrounded by a white picket fence, eating meat and three veg, first sign off on, and then BUILD the exquisite Jewel for the Ages that is the Sydney Opera House?

Yes, now that you put it that way…

Sarah Shaffi, writing for The Guardian, identifies five publishing trends to emerge from the 2022 London Bookfair, which ran from 5 to 7 April 2022.

• More books written by celebrities can be expected
• There will be increased interest in books relating to Ukraine
• Books based on Greek Myths, with a modern re-telling, will remain popular
• More novels will feature women who are threatened or in peril
• A more topical range of self-help books, for a troubled world, will be published

David Byrne, the Scottish-American musician, and co-founder of defunct American band Talking Heads, recently published a hardcover book, A History of the World (in Dingbats), a meditation of life during the recent pandemic imposed lockdowns.

Through striking and humorous figurative drawings, the iconic artist and musician David Byrne depicts daily life in intriguing ways. His illustrations, created while under quarantine, expand on the dingbat, a typographic ornament used to illuminate or break up blocks of text, to explore the nuances of life under lockdown and evoke the complex, global systems the pandemic cast in bright light.

Entries for the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize are open until Wednesday 15 June 2022, in two categories, Adult novels, and Children and Young Adult (CYA), to authors who are citizens, or residents, of Australia or New Zealand.

The Prize is worth a total of $100,000 in prize monies; $50,000 will be awarded to the Adult category winner, with an additional $5,000 to be awarded to each of the remaining two shortlisted authors. In the CYA category, the winner will receive $30,000, while the two short listers will receive $5,000 each.

To be eligible, works must have been published between 1 July 2021 and 30 June 2022, and have most of the story set at least fifty years ago. The longlist, made up of nine titles, will be announced on Wednesday 14 September 2022.