The 2022 Melbourne Rare Book Fair
30 May 2022
The Melbourne Rare Book Fair returns in 2022 after a COVID enforced break, and takes place at the University of Melbourne, from Thursday 7 July 2022 until Sunday 9 July.
The Melbourne Rare Book Fair is the major annual book fair of ANZAAB and one of only a few rare book fairs in the Southern hemisphere. Now in its 49th edition, and 50th year, the Melbourne Rare Book Fair will again feature rare and wonderful books, manuscripts, ephemera, prints (and much more) from the best rare book and antiquarian dealers across Australia and New Zealand and overseas.
If newer and bountiful aren’t your thing, then the Rare Book Fair may be the place for you.
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood unburnable edition
30 May 2022
With books being banned or burned, or both, in some parts, Toronto based Canadian poet and author Margaret Atwood has published a fireproof limited edition of her 1998 novel The Handmaiden’s Tale, which is, surprise, surprise, among titles banned in some jurisdictions. Coated with a fire retardant material, the book is able to withstand the fiery force of a flamethrower.
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books, Margaret Atwood, novels
Kathryn Barker’s Waking Romeo wins Aurealis best sci-fi novel
28 May 2022
Waking Romeo (published by Allen & Unwin, March 2021), by Sydney based Australian author Kathryn Barker, has been named winner of the Best Science Fiction Novel, in the 2021 Aurealis Awards.
It’s the end of the world. Literally. Time travel is possible, but only forwards. And only a handful of families choose to remain in the ‘now’, living off the scraps that were left behind. Among these are eighteen-year-old Juliet and the love of her life, Romeo. But things are far from rosy for Jules. Romeo is in a coma and she’s estranged from her friends and family, dealing with the very real fallout of their wild romance. Then a handsome time traveller, Ellis, arrives with an important mission that makes Jules question everything she knows about life and love. Can Jules wake Romeo and rewrite her future?
The Aurealis Awards have been honouring Australian science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers since 1995. The full list of winners in the 2021 awards can be seen here.
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Aurealis Awards, Kathryn Barker, literary awards, science fiction
Pistol, the story of the Sex Pistols by Danny Boyle
28 May 2022
Pistol, trailer, a six-part TV series tracking the rise, and fall, of legendary punk band, the Sex Pistols, debuts on Tuesday 31 May 2022.
The series is based on the 2016 memoir Lonely Boy, by Steve Jones, former guitarist of the English group, and is directed by British filmmaker Danny Boyle, he of Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, and Slum Dog Millionaire, fame.
Actually we’re not into music, we’re into chaos.
Hell yeah. Time to break out Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, the group’s only studio album, released in 1977. God Save the Queen, Anarchy in the UK, Pretty Vacant… the music only gets better as time goes by.
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In ten billion years the universe will double in size
28 May 2022
The Hubble constant expresses the rate at which the universe is expanding. The problem is though, no one has been able to nail down a precise value for the constant. That is, until now.
When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 the universe’s expansion rate was so uncertain that its age might only be 8 billion years or as great as 20 billion years. After 30 years of meticulous work using the Hubble telescope’s extraordinary observing power, numerous teams of astronomers have narrowed the expansion rate to a precision of just over 1%. This can be used to predict that the universe will double in size in 10 billion years.
That’s mind blowing. To say the least. The already enormous cosmos will one day be twice its present size. Too bad no one here today will be around to see it. But what does it matter anyway? Well, you’d be surprised. Given some two point two million new books are published every year, one can only imagine how many more publications there’ll be in ten billion years’ time.
With a much larger universe by then, it’s comforting to know there will be space to put them somewhere…
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Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree wins International Booker Prize
27 May 2022
Tomb of Sand (published by Penguin Random House India, March 2022) by New Delhi based Indian author Geetanjali Shree, and translated by Daisy Rockwell, has been named winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize.
In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression after the death of her husband, and then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a transgender person – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.
Frank Wynne, Booker Prize judges chair, described Tomb of Sand, also the first novel originally written in any Indian language, and the first book translated from Hindi, to win the award, thusly:
This is a luminous novel of India and partition, but one whose spellbinding brio and fierce compassion weaves youth and age, male and female, family and nation into a kaleidoscopic whole.
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Geetanjali Shree, International Booker Prize, literary awards
Dancing With No Music art show at aMBUSH Waterloo Sydney
27 May 2022
The Dancing With No Music art exhibition opened at aMBUSH Gallery in the Sydney suburb of Waterloo last night. On show was the work of National Art School second year Master of Fine Art students, including Jessica Callen, Emily Ebbs, Joseph Christie Evans, Daniel McClellan, Nina Radonja, Wolfgang Saker, Kansas Smeaton, Jack Thorn, and Elle Wickens.
The diverse works in Dancing With No Music are anchored and inspired by a quote from German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Through their varied painting practices, it explores the concept that in making art, individuals conjure up certain methods, inspired by their own ‘music’. Much like the artists’ varying perspectives, when creating their work the ‘dance’ is to their own music and not a collective rhythm.
The exhibition closes on Sunday 29 May 2022. Check out a few more of my photos from the opening night here.
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art, art shows, Australian art, exhibitions
Anna Spargo Ryan: hope and relief after the Australian election?
27 May 2022
Melbourne based Australian author, Anna Spargo-Ryan, who’s novels include The Paper House, and The Gulf, writes about the hope and relief some Australians are feeling — at least momentarily — as a result of the change of government in Australia last weekend.
For today – and maybe only for today, but we’ll see how things pan out – I feel held. Not fighting the solipsistic dread with weapons made out of my own wellbeing, but part of a community that has chosen to vote for the betterment of others. That’s new. It feels good to sit with it, to briefly imagine, in the words of famous internet depressed person Allie Brosh, that maybe everything isn’t hopeless bullshit.
The mood is a little different presently, but there often is when a new administration is elected. Whether things will be become “better” long term? That remains to be seen.
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Anna Spargo-Ryan, Australia, politics
Vale Colin Cantwell science fiction concept artist
27 May 2022
The late American concept artist, who died last week at the age of 90, was behind the concept and design of many of the vessels seen in the early Star Wars films.
His staggering number of designs and prototype models essentially formed the visual Star Wars starship lexicon, and include the X-wing, Y-wing (the first approved design, according to The Making of Star Wars), TIE fighter, Star Destroyer, Death Star, landspeeder, sandcrawler, and blockade runner (a design originally intended for the Millennium Falcon).
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Colin Cantwell, science fiction, Star Wars
2022 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize
27 May 2022
Entries are open for the 2022 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize until Sunday 5 June 2022, from Indigenous writers across Australia, of all ages, for unpublished poetry.
This prize is named in honour of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse (with permission from the Walker family, and in close consultation with Quandamooka Festival). The Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize is open to all Indigenous poets, emerging and established, throughout Australia.
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Australian literature, Australian poetry, awards, Indigenous poetry