The winners of the 2022 Ned Kelly awards for crime writing were announced a couple of weeks ago, with a total of one hundred and thirty-five entries vying for the top spot in four award categories.
Going offshore, Toronto, Canada, based author Nita Prose took out the award for Best International Crime Fiction published in Australia, with The Maid.
Named for notorious nineteenth century Australian bushranger and outlaw Ned Kelly, the awards have celebrated the best Australian crime writing since their inception in 1996.
“London Bridge is down” is said to be the official code phrase used by British authorities to convey news of the death of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, in government circles. And now that the Queen has died, a plan called Operation London Bridge, outlining happenings in the hours and days that follow, will be executed.
The prime minister will be woken, if she is not already awake, and civil servants will say “London Bridge is down” on secure lines. From the Foreign Office’s Global Response Centre, at an undisclosed location in the capital, the news will go out to the 15 governments outside the UK where the Queen is also the head of state, and the 36 other nations of the Commonwealth for whom she has served as a symbolic figurehead – a face familiar in dreams and the untidy drawings of a billion schoolchildren – since the dawn of the atomic age.
But before Operation London Bridge plan can be put into effect, Operation Unicorn needs to play out. Operation Unicorn was devised in the event the Queen died in Scotland. As she usually spent three months a year at Balmoral Castle, about eighty kilometres west of Aberdeen, the possibility of her dying there needed to be taken into account.
It is expected her body will be transported from Balmoral to the nearby city of Aberdeen on Friday morning local time. It will then be loaded onto the Royal Train for a journey down Scotland’s east coast to the capital, Edinburgh. Mourners are expected to line the route and kilted soldiers will form guards of honour at stations along the way.
The Queen’s body will lie in state at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, before travelling by train to London. Once the train crosses the Scottish border into England, Operation London Bridge will commence.
Regardless of the subject matter the Kurzgesagt videos are never dull. Their latest takes on the question of why people are lonely, and offers some constructive solutions. One initiative are the newly launched Kurzgesagt Meetups… where likeminded Kurzgesagt followers across the world, who are aged eighteen or over, can arrange gatherings locally.
Extraversion and introversion also features in the discussion, where I learnt introverts are generally not fans of spicy food. I’d not thought about that before. You learn something new everyday.
Melbourne based author and lawyer Alice Pung was named chair of judges for the 2023 Stella Prize last month. The prize, which recognises the work of women and non-binary writers, is one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards.
Meanwhile Leaping into Waterfalls by Sydney based writer and literary critic Bernadette Brennan — a biography of late Australian short story writer and novelist Gillian Mears — has taken out the award for non-fiction.
The Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize was in the past awarded to works of — you guessed it — poetry, but this doesn’t appear to have been presented since 2012.
Players feel the pull of voltage and see the flow of current as they discover electronics in a tangible and deeply intuitive way, using the first physical equivalent of electronics ever built.
Andrew Jamieson, writing for WePresent, on the upsides of the sometimes debilitating midlife crisis experience. Shortly after turning fifty, Jamieson reports not moving from his bed for almost ten weeks, as all manner of uncertainties and anxieties weighed on him. Despite the melancholy some people might feel at reaching such a milestone, a midlife crisis can lead to a creative resurgence. I’m pleased something positive came of the ordeal.
In reading the accounts of these notable individuals and how they battled through their midlife crises, I began to realize that these harrowing feelings were perhaps not just some arbitrary misery, but rather a transformative experience. They seemed to turn ordinary individuals into exceptional men and women who achieved not only significant outward success, but also a striking level of inner serenity when facing the later challenges of their lives. Perhaps these anxieties and depression that I was so overwhelmed by could become a portal into some new phase of life.
Featured above is the cover of Shehan Karunatilaka’s shortlisted title The Seven Moons of Maali Almeid. It would win the disassociated prize for best book cover on the Booker Prize shortlist, if there were such a thing.
The winner will be announced on Monday 17 October 2022.
The outer ring came close to looking like Morse Code and was giving some output that almost looked like real words, but just a bit too gibberish. After much banging-of-heads-on-keyboards we realised I’d transcoded the outer strings wrong, which meant of course we were trying to break codes that didn’t exist.
Note that Sen’s article contains spoilers, the messages are revealed in their entirety, so read it later if you still want to decode the coin’s messages yourself.
