Unforgettable descriptions of food in literature
4 April 2022
Some meal time reading for sure… twelve of the most unforgettable descriptions of food in literature, curated by Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. The writing of Haruki Murakami, Nora Ephron, Marcel Proust, and late American writer and illustrator Louise Fitzhugh, among others, is featured.
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Entries for the 2022 Banjo Prize are open
4 April 2022
The Banjo Prize gives Australian writers the opportunity to have their manuscript published, and entries for the 2022 Banjo Prize are open until Friday 27 May 2022.
Past recipients include journalist Tim Slee, winner of the inaugural prize in 2018 with Taking Tom Murray Home, and Sydney based Dinuka McKenzie in 2020 with The Torrent. The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 6 September 2022.
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Australian literature, awards, Banjo Prize
The 2022 Stella Prize shortlist
3 April 2022
The shortlist for the 2022 Stella Prize was announced on Thursday 31 March 2022. The six titles, the work of Australian women and non-binary writers, along with an excerpt of the judges’ comments for each book are as follows:
Bodies of Light, by Jennifer Down.
This is an ambitious novel, spanning decades and locales, that sees Down demonstrate her imaginative range and take risks following the success of her previous two books. The result is a daring and compelling work, suffused with pathos and an impressive degree of empathic vulnerability.
Dropbear, by Evelyn Araluen.
Dropbear is a breathtaking collection of poetry and short prose which arrests key icons of mainstream Australian culture and turns them inside out, with malice aforethought. Araluen’s brilliance sizzles when she goes on the attack against the kitsch and the cuddly: against Australia’s fantasy of its own racial and environmental innocence.
Homecoming, by Elfie Shiosaki.
Homecoming is both a genre-defying book, and a deeply respectful ode to the persistence of Noongar people in the face of colonisation and its afterlives… Shiosaki has delivered a work of poetic and narrative genius and can be read either as an ensemble of poems or as a single piece that moves seamlessly between the elegiac and the joyful.
No Document, by Anwen Crawford.
No Document is a longform poetic essay that considers the ways we might use an experience of grief to continue living, creating, and reimagining the world we live in with greater compassion and honour… This work is a complex, deeply thought, and deeply felt ode to friendship and collaboration.
Stone Fruit, by Lee Lai.
Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit is a moving graphic novel in which queer couple, Bron and Ray, find themselves at a tense crossroads in their relationship. Throughout scenes rendered in Lai’s signature art style – simple lines and a muted blue and grey colour palette – and featuring spare, perfectly articulated dialogue… Stone Fruit beautifully reflects a tender domesticity that is affecting and atmospheric.
Andrada’s collection adroitly combines the personal, the political, and the geopolitical, narrated by a voice that is at once hip, witty, and deeply serious. Andrada has the imaginative ability to move between the memories of poet-narrators, historical asides, reflections on the nature of race and feminism in Australia, and questions of colonisation both locally and in the Philippines. Formally remarkable, stylistically impressive, and often surprising, TAKE CARE is a collection that understands the ways in which ‘There are things we must kill / so we can live to celebrate.’
If the Stellas are about finding writing that mixes it up and shakes it around a bit, then the contest for this year’s Prize is going to be fascinating.
In the past novels, non-fiction, biographies, and memoirs have won, but in 2022 works of poetry have a better than average chance of prevailing, with the work of three poets in the shortlist.
Then of course there is Stone Fruit, Lee Lai’s graphic novel. Bring on Thursday 28 April, the day the winner is announced I say.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
In the Margins, a glimpse into Elena Ferrante’s writing process
3 April 2022
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing is a must read for fans of Italian author Elena Ferrante. In four essays, she writes about becoming an author, her influences, and struggles, which included developing a voice, which Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing for The Guardian, notes:
Ferrante has been acclaimed for her “singular”, “uncompromising” voice, and her “ruthless” honesty. But what emerges from the first lecture, Pain and Pen, is just how cramped and conflicted she felt trying to develop this voice. It was an agonising negotiation between a “compliant” style of writing that stayed “diligently within the margins” and a more “impetuous” approach, which allows “unexpected truth” to spill out on to the page.
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Klara and the Sun wins the 2022 Tournament of Books
3 April 2022
Another gong for Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun, after winning The Morning News 2022 Tournament of Books. Ishiguro’s book went up against No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood in the final round, and emerged the victor after winning eleven votes to six.
Running every March, the Tournament of Books is like an elimination contest, and starts with a longlist of fiction titles considered to be “worthy tournament competitors” that is formed in December. From there a shortlist of sixteen, sometimes more, books is produced, before they go head to head against each other, but that’s only a brief outline of how the tournament works.
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Kazuo Ishiguro, Patricia Lockwood
The Lessons, a new novel by John Purcell
31 March 2022
The Lessons, published by 4th Estate/HarperCollins Publishers, is the latest novel by Kent, England, based Australian author John Purcell, and follows on from his earlier books, The Girl On The Page, and The Secret Lives of Emma trilogy.
The first few sentences of the synopsis for The Lessons suggests it is partly a lost-love story:
1961: When teens Daisy and Harry meet, it feels so right they promise to love each other forever, but in 1960s England everything is stacked against them: class, education, expectations. When Daisy is sent by her parents to live with her glamorous, bohemian Aunt Jane, a novelist working on her second book, she is confronted by adult truths and suffers a loss of innocence that flings her far from the one good thing in her life, Harry.
1983: Jane Curtis, now a famous novelist, is at a prestigious book event in New York, being interviewed about her life and work, including a novel about the traumatic coming of age of a young woman. But she won’t answer the interviewer’s probing questions. What is she trying to hide?
We see that Aunt Jane has become an established author, but what has become of Daisy and Harry, the apparently star-crossed lovers? Has her fame stemmed from appropriating their story? Who knows, but there’s a hint here she knows more than she’s letting on. Maybe.
The Lessons will be on bookshelves from 13 April 2022, and Purcell will be travelling to Australia to promote the title. The book launch takes place at Readings Emporium, in Melbourne, on Thursday 28 April 2022.
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Australian writing, John Purcell
Twitter bots surge following Russian invasion of Ukraine
31 March 2022
Tim Graham, senior lecturer in digital media at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Digital Media Research Centre, has detected a significant surge in Twitter bots, being automated accounts on the social networking service, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month. It seems the purpose of many of these bots is to boost, or amplify, other Twitter accounts that are disseminating propaganda supporting the Russian invasion.
The massive spike around February 24, the day of the invasion, indicated some were probably bots, but was not conclusive. Next, Dr Graham deployed a specialised software called Botometer, which uses a machine-learning algorithm to distinguish bot accounts from human ones by looking at the features of a profile, including friends, social network structure, language, and sentiment. The model gives accounts a score from zero to one, with one showing it’s certain the account is a bot. “When we ran this model and checked the result, there was clearly this huge spike of accounts which had almost a perfect bot score,” Dr Graham said.
Twitter remains unconvinced by Graham’s work though, suggesting aspects of his research may be flawed, and asserting they have more information at their disposal in assessing whether or not accounts are automated or genuine.
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Self-portrait by Andrew Pippos, for Openbook magazine
30 March 2022
Sydney based Australian author Andrew Pippos, whose debut 2020 novel Lucky’s was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award, writing for the State Library of NSW’s Openbook magazine, an excerpt from an upcoming new book of his, I believe.
My father enjoyed telling people he’d never read a book in his life, as if this were a detail you might remember about him, as if it were some great stroke of luck, like never being issued with a speeding ticket.
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Andrew Pippos, Australian literature
The Best Australian Yarn Short Story Competition 2022
30 March 2022
The Best Australian Yarn is another generous local literary award currently accepting submissions for short stories of between 1500 – 2500 words.
Short stories have the power to transport us to another world, they educate and entertain us, and can make the everyday seem extraordinary.
A collaboration between The West Australian and the Minderoo Foundation, entries for The Best Australian Yarn are open until Tuesday 31 May 2022, to Australians everywhere aged twelve or over.
A total of A$50,000 in prize money is on offer. The overall winner will be awarded A$30,000, the West Australian winner A$4,000, Regional Australia winner $3,000, the Youth winner will received $2,000 and mentoring opportunities, while the nine shortlisted entrants will received A$1,000 each.
In addition, the winner of the Readers’ Choice award, as determined by a public vote, will receive A$2,000. The longlist, consisting of fifty works, will be announced in August 2022.
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Australian literature, literary awards
The Barbara Jefferis Award 2022
30 March 2022
Entries are open for the biennial Barbara Jefferis Award, to commemorate the life of the late Australian author, who died in 2004. The literary prize was established in 2007 through a bequest from Jefferis’ husband John Hinde, an Australian broadcaster and film critic, who died in 2006.
The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered biennially for “the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society”.
With a prize A$50,000 for the winner, and a further A$5,000 shared among those named on the shortlist, the award is one of the richest in Australian literature. Entries close on Monday 9 May 2022, with the shortlist scheduled to be announced in August.
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