2022 International Booker Prize longlist
11 March 2022
Thirteen titles have been named on the 2022 International Booker Prize longlist. Awarded in its present format since 2016, the International Booker celebrates works translated into English, with the £50,000 prize split equally between the author and translator.
Among the titles translated from eleven languages into English, is Tomb of Sand, by New Delhi based Indian author Geetanjali Shree, and translated by American writer and painter Daisy Rockwell. Shree’s work is the first book written in Hindi to be included on the International Booker Prize longlist.
Just about all of these titles are new to me — the books I read, when time permits, tend to be contemporary Australian, but not always — so it’s good to see something new and not so familiar, that I can add to my to-be-read list.
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Booker Prize, literature, writing
Adaptable 2021/22 text to screen longlist announced
11 March 2022
Adaptable is an initiative of the Queensland Writers Centre that connects aspiring screen writers, working across all genres, with film and television producers.
Adaptable seeks material for film or television adaptation. Open to writers across Australia and New Zealand, the contest accepts any genre, fiction or non-fiction, published or unpublished. Queensland Writers Centre also identifes several early career unpublished/emerging writers to pitch their work to screen creatives, with these writers receiving mentorship and advice prior to the pitching sessions.
A longlist of contenders was unveiled this week, with the shortlist to follow shortly.
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Regurgitator, The Fauves, Phil Jamieson, in Lismore flood fundraiser
11 March 2022
Nine bands including Brisbane based act Regurgitator, and The Fauves from Melbourne, perform this evening, Friday 11 March, at The Brightside to help raise funds for flood relief efforts for the north-eastern NSW town of Lismore.
Regurgitator, Phil Jamieson, and The Fauves are among the artists banding together for a special fundraiser show in Brisbane this Friday night, raising money for the city of Lismore which has been so badly impacted by recent floods.
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Apollo 10 1/2, a film by Richard Linklater
10 March 2022
Talk about the trip of a lifetime. American space agency NASA accidently builds an Apollo Moon lander that’s too small for adult astronauts. So the investment doesn’t go to waste, a young boy is clandestinely recruited to take the vessel to the lunar surface, in Apollo 10 1/2, trailer, an animated feature directed by Richard Linklater.
The story of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others. It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.
Apollo ten and a half, this is Houston. Do you read?
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animation, film, Richard Linklater, trailer
Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 longlist
10 March 2022
The longlist for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced on Tuesday. Just under ten percent of the original one hundred-and-seventy-five submissions were among the sixteen titles selected. A few familiar titles leapt out at me: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Hellerand, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. The shortlist, consisting of six titles, will be announced on Wednesday 27 April.
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Gabrielle Wang named new Australian Children’s Laureate
9 March 2022
Melbourne based writer Gabrielle Wang has been named the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2022 and 2023. Wang, the seventh person to be accorded the title, succeeds Ursula Dubosarsky who was in the role from 2020 to 2021. What exactly is a laureate, you ask? Good question. It’s a term we hear quite often, and not only in literary circles, but here’s a brief explanation.
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Australian writing, Gabrielle Wang
Heardle, the musical version of Wordle
9 March 2022
Heardle takes the Wordle experience, and translates it to music. You have six attempts to guess the title of a snippet of music, which you can hear anywhere from five to thirty seconds of, to help you figure it out.
Heardle is one of several variations of Josh Wardle’s word game (I’m not talking about outright duplicates here), that have spawned since October 2021.
It’s the latest in a string of Wordle-inspired online games to have popped up recently, including Worldle, which tests users’ geography knowledge, Dungleon, featuring fantasy characters over words, and the battle royale version, Squabble, where up to 99 players can race to figure out the word correctly, losing health points if they guess wrong.
If you’re familiar with music released in the last ten years, then you should have little difficulty winning Heardle. But will it be the next big thing, behind Wordle? Possibly. According to its creators “Heardle was made for a small group of friends, then somehow gained millions of players overnight.”
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Trailer for My Brilliant Friend season three
8 March 2022
A trailer for season three of the HBO produced series My Brilliant Friend, based on Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel of the four part Neapolitan Novels series, written by Italian author Elena Ferrante, between 2011 and 2014.
And in case you (somehow) missed it, a Netflix made teaser for the in production Lying Life of Adults series, based on Ferrante’s 2019 novel of the same name, which is coming to a screen near you maybe later this year.
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The first casualty when war comes is truth
8 March 2022
Twenty-five year old Oleksandra lives in Kharkiv, a city in Ukraine, about thirty kilometres from the Russian border. Her parents live in Russia, but so far Oleksandra has failed to convince them of the danger the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses to her, and Kharkiv.
“My parents understand that some military action is happening here. But they say: ‘Russians came to liberate you. They won’t ruin anything, they won’t touch you. They’re only targeting military bases’.” While we were interviewing Oleksandra, the shelling went on. The internet connection was weak, so we had to exchange voice messages. “I’ve almost forgotten what silence sounds like. They’re shelling non-stop,” she said.
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Loveland, by Robert Lukins, Melbourne book launch
8 March 2022
If you’re fast, you may still be able to score a (free) ticket to the launch of Melbourne based Australian writer Robert Lukins‘ second novel Loveland, tomorrow evening, Wednesday 9 March, at Readings Carlton, from 6:30PM.
Amid the ruins of a fire-ravaged amusement park and destroyed waterfront dwellings, one boarded-up building still stands. May has come from Australia to Loveland, Nebraska, to claim the house on the poisoned lake as part of her grandmother’s will. Escaping the control of her husband, will she find refuge or danger?
As she starts repairing the old house, May is drawn to discover more about her silent, emotionally distant grandmother and unravel the secrets that Casey had moved halfway around the world to keep hidden. How she and Casey’s lives interconnect, and the price they both must pay for their courage, is gradually revealed as this mesmerising and lyrical novel unfolds.
In an article in Good Weekend, published last Saturday, Lukins explains that seeing the bleak cover of the 1982 Bruce Springsteen album, Nebraska, as a ten-year old, partly inspired Loveland, which is set in the American state of the same name:
The cover of Nebraska, with that black-and-white photograph taken from the front seat of an old pick-up truck in deep winter. An empty highway is peeling away into an American horizon that was impossibly flat and infinitely distant. Snow is banked up on the truck’s hood and to me, a Sunshine Coast kid who lived permanently beneath fluoro board shorts and a stripe of zinc cream, this image was pure exoticism, pure mystery.
If this were Instagram, what would you call the filter on the cover of Loveland? Vintage? Retro? Whatever, I’ve added the novel to my to-be-read list.
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