The 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist
5 April 2022
The 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards shortlist was announced today, and sees fifty-eight works of writing, spread across ten categories, vie for prize money worth $285,000:
- Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
- Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction ($40,000)
- Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
- Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)
- Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000)
- Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000)
- Indigenous Writers’ Prize, presented biennially ($30,000)
- UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
- Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
- Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon, TAKE CARE by Eunice Andrada, Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen, Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah, After Story by Larissa Behrendt, and Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss, are among contenders for the prizes.
Winners will be named on Monday 16 May 2022, being the commencement of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
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RÜFÜS DU SOL win at the 2022 Grammy Awards
5 April 2022
Sydney based dance/electronic act RÜFÜS DU SOL won the Best Dance/Electronic Recording award for their track Alive at the 2022 Grammy Awards, held yesterday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vagas.
Other Australian musicians, and their work, nominated this year were The Kid LAROI for Best New Artist, Shot In The Dark by AC/DC for Best Rock Performance, Power Up by AC/DC for Best Rock Album, Mood Valiant by Hiatus Kaiyote for Best Progressive R&B Album, and Shot In the Dark by AC/DC for Best Music Video. Good to see AC/DC, who have been working for nearly fifty years, feature so prominently.
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Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, Benjamin Stevenson
5 April 2022
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, the new novel from Australian stand-up comedian and author Benjamin Stevenson, has a synopsis to match its eye-catching title, a veritable contender for novel title of the year award if there were such a thing:
I was dreading the Cunningham family reunion even before the first murder. Before the storm stranded us at the mountain resort, snow and bodies piling up. The thing is, us Cunninghams don’t really get along. We’ve only got one thing in common — we’ve all killed someone. My brother. My step-sister. My wife. My father. My mother. My sister-in-law. My uncle. My stepfather. My aunt. Me.
The quirkiness doesn’t end with the premise and name though, even Stevenson’s way of story-telling deviates slightly from the norm, he tells us how the novel ends on the first page, as he explains to Australian critic Beejay Silcox, writing for The Guardian:
Benjamin Stevenson has a cinephile buddy who seeks out spoilers. Once an ending is good and ruined, he can focus on the film. Stevenson’s new novel was inspired by this back-to-front tactic. “I thought: ‘what if I spoiled the entire book on the first page,” the author explained in a recent interview, “can I build a crime novel out of it?”‘.
Maybe there’s something in taking such an approach… Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone has been optioned for a limited series adaptation by Home Box Office (HBO).
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The Ukraine, an excerpt from the novel by Artem Chapeye
5 April 2022
An excerpt from The Ukraine, written by Ukrainian author Artem Chapeye, published in The New Yorker. Chapeye is currently serving in the Ukrainian army, fighting the Russian invasion. He also spoke with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor for The New Yorker, about defending Ukraine, and expresses a sentiment that may resonate with some:
What’s most amazing, I think, is that most of us didn’t even expect so much resistance and solidarity from ourselves.
The Ukraine will be published in English in 2023.
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The flight of the drone, Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg
4 April 2022
Go to full screen and take-in this stunning drone fly-through at Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, Tesla’s European manufacturing facility.
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The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
4 April 2022
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, trailer, directed by Emma Cooper for Netflix, explores the circumstances surrounding the 1962 death of American actor Marilyn Monroe.
[The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes] explores the mystery surrounding the death of movie icon Marilyn Monroe through previously unheard interviews with her inner circle.
While Monroe’s death was ruled suicide through a barbiturate overdose, some people believe Monroe was murdered, despite a police investigation finding no evidence of foul play.
The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes goes to air on Wednesday 27 April 2022.
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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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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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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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