Deutsche Bank Fellowship for First Nations Film Creatives
21 April 2022
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.
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2022 Newcastle Short Story Award
21 April 2022
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.
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Groundskeeping by Lee Cole
20 April 2022
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.
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Sisters in Crime celebrate thirty years in Australia
20 April 2022
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.
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Keep Stepping, a documentary by Luke Cornish
19 April 2022
Keep Stepping, trailer, by Sydney based documentary maker Luke Cornish, which has its world premiere at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival, explores the world of competitive street dancing in Australia.
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?
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film, film festivals, Luke Cornish, Sydney Film Festival, trailer
Nicholas Wasiliev speaks to Stella Prize shortlist writers
19 April 2022
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.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
Time’s absence may make the universe easier to understand
19 April 2022
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.
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Koenji’s Manuscript Writing Cafe, for writers on deadlines
19 April 2022
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.
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2022 Australian Book Design Awards shortlist
19 April 2022
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.
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Australian literature, awards, design
All Twitter hashtags for Australian democracy sausage emoji
16 April 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.
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