Sydney Muslim Writers’ Festival 2022
14 January 2022
The inaugural Sydney Muslim Writers’ Festival takes place over three days, with an opening night on Thursday 3 February 2022, a festival day on Saturday 12 February, and writing workshops on Sunday 13 February. Follow the Festival’s Instagram page for more information.
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2022 black&write! Writing Fellowships
14 January 2022
Applications are open for the 2022 black&write! Writing Fellowships, an initiative to support the work of First Nations writers across Australia. Two fellowships are awarded annually, and are accompanied by a cash prize, assistance with developing a manuscript, and an opportunity to publish work with Hachette Australia. Applications close on Wednesday 2 February 2022.
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Australian writing, Indigenous literature, literature
Warning: book clubs may be a threat to your life
14 January 2022
Killing Katie: Confessions Of A Book Club, the debut play of late Sydney based Australian scriptwriter Tracey Trinder, takes theatre goers into the sometimes murky world of book clubs. Think book clubs are groups of likeminded novel aficionados, happily swapping notes about their latest reads? Think again.
Trinder’s play lifts the lid on bitter internal politics, feuding, and murder, after the straight talking, bold Katie, joins a readers group convened by Robyn. Unhappy with Katie’s unseemly exuberance, Robyn plots to remove her from the club, with unforeseen dire consequences.
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Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet
14 January 2022
If Case Study (published by Text Publishing, 19 October 2021), the fourth novel of Glasgow based Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet, were a movie — and who knows, it might yet be — based upon video or film clips, it would be called a found footage story. The found footage technique is commonly seen in horror films, but it be could argued there’s elements of horror in Burnet’s latest work.
The literary equivalent of found footage is epistolary, where a story is told through a series of letters, or other written works, of which Case Study is an example. Martin Grey, who lives in present day Clacton-on-Sea, contacts the author after finding five diaries written by his cousin some fifty years earlier, under the pen name Rebecca Smyth. The journals detail her dealings with Collins Braithwaite, a therapist, who is remembered for his unconventional practise methods.
Rebecca’s sister Veronica, who had been a patient of Braithwaite’s for two years, killed herself, and Rebecca has no doubt the therapist was responsible. After creating a fictitious identity, and new persona for herself, Rebecca likewise becomes a patient of Braithwaite, in order to find out more about him. As the author reads the journals though, he comes to realise the intrinsically straight-laced journal writer was becoming ever more delusional, as she increasingly wrapped herself up in her free-spirited alter-ego.
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fiction, Graeme Macrae Burnet, TBR list, writing
Writing tips for emerging authors from George Saunders
12 January 2022
Words of advice for aspiring writers by American author George Saunders, and winner of the 2017 Booker Prize. This one resonates with me:
Know when you over-revise: those new to writing should overwrite just “to get a familiarity with their particular world. We have to learn our individual symptoms” of over-revision. “For me,” Saunders says, “the symptom is the humour goes out of it.”
In writings of mine there’s always the temptation to go into great detail about settings and environments. It seems to me if I over-revise, or cut out superfluous information, I know I’ve gone too far in doing so if the story loses its soul, or becomes too dry. But Saunders is right, overwriting is a great way to become familiar with the backdrop to the story you’re writing.
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Books people in government should be reading
12 January 2022
Leaders should be readers, says Australian federal politician Andrew Leigh, who has compiled a list of reading suggestions for those in high office. Good to see a few fiction titles on the list, including Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan, and One Hundred Days by Alice Pung.
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Man accused of stealing unpublished books arrested
10 January 2022
An Italian man who has been using deception for several years to obtain unpublished manuscripts from well-known authors, has been arrested. Targets of Filippo Bernardini, who works at a London publishing house, included Margaret Atwood and Sally Rooney.
In an interview with The Bookseller in 2019, Atwood confirmed there had been “concerted efforts to steal the manuscript” of her book The Testaments, before it was released. “There were lots of phoney emails from people trying to winkle even just three pages, even just anything,” she noted. According to The Guardian and The New York Times, author Sally Rooney and actor Ethan Hawke were also targeted in a similar manner.
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Elizabeth Guy discusses Take Ink & Weep on SBS Russian
10 January 2022
Sydney based Australian writer and literature teacher Elizabeth Guy talks to Irina Burmistrova on the SBS Russian podcast about her novel Take Ink & Weep, a story set in 1915 about four Russian poets who believe their work will make the world a better place.
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Combatting the spread of COVID-19 in Australia
10 January 2022
Australia needs to adopt a vaccine-plus strategy to combat the rapid spread of COVID-19, says C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, at Sydney’s UNSW, writing for The Conversation.
Among other things, this includes expanding PCR testing capacity, making rapid antigen test kits freely available to everyone, ditto high quality face masks, and stepping up the vaccine booster program.
If there’s no change in policy, there will be a higher, faster peak that far exceeds available health care, which may then force a lockdown. If people who need simple measures like oxygen cannot get a hospital bed, the death rate will start rising. The other option is to use “vaccines-plus” to flatten the curve and ease the load on society and the health system.
The perception the Omicron strain of COVID-19 is mild — thinking that possibly resulted in Australian federal and state government leaving the virus to spread — while sounding comforting, is not necessarily the case, says MacIntyre:
The Omicron wave has made health systems buckle in most states, with NSW worst affected currently. Delta was twice as severe as previous variants, so if Omicron is 20-45% less severe than Delta, that’s still no laughing matter with low booster rates.
It’s food for thought, considering the long term effects of the virus are yet to be understood. It sounds like prevention is easier than cure, but prevention is not easy.
It’s worth doing everything we can to prevent COVID and the long term burden of illness it may cause. In addition to long COVID, SARS-CoV-2 lingers in the heart, brain and many other organs long after the acute infection, and we don’t know the long term impacts of this.
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Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel
7 January 2022
Where are we in time? Where is the motion of the cosmos taking us? Forwards or backwards? Possibly though, you feel you’re stuck in neutral, moving nowhere, yet keenly aware of each passing minute. The strange times we live in have left many of us displaced and confused.
Sea of Tranquility (published by Pan Macmillan Australia, May 2022), the sixth novel of Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, may well be a microcosm of our pandemic dominated epoch. Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective living in the twenty-fifth century, is asked to investigate a suspected anomaly in time.
But his search for answers is far from straightforward. The detective finds a young man, Edwin St. Andrew, who claims to be the son of a noble British family, who lived in the early twentieth century. And then there is Olive Llewelyn, an author unable to travel home because of a pandemic, who apparently lives in the twenty-third century.
What brings Edwin and Olive to the present day, and how? But is everything as it really seems to be in this usual world? Are Edwin and Olive who they claim to be, or is something else at play? Might the detective have stumbled upon some sort of switch junction in time, explaining the presence of Edwin and Olive?
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