Showing all posts tagged: Australian literature
Nam Le wins 2025 NSW Literary Awards Book of the Year prize
21 May 2025
Vietnamese Australian lawyer turned writer Nam Le has won the Book of the Year Award prize, with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, a collection of poetry, in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.
Earlier, Le was named recipient of the Multicultural NSW Award. Winners of the NSW Literary Awards, previously known as the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, which span eleven categories, including the people’s choice prize, were announced at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, on Monday 19 May 2025. The Book of the Year recipient is selected from the winners of the Award’s other categories.
Other recipients include Fiona McFarlane, who won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction with Highway 13, and Emma Lord, who took out the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature prize for her debut novel Anomaly. The full list of 2025 winners can be seen here.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards, literature, novels
Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, Katerina Gibson, named Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025
19 May 2025
Winnie Dunn, Jumaana Abdu, and Katerina Gibson, have been named the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for 2025.
Gibson also won the prize in 2023. Meanwhile Adbu’s novel Translations, has been shortlisted in this year’s Stella Prize, while Dunn’s novel Dirt Poor Islanders, was included on the longlist for the 2025 Miles Franklin award, which was announced last week.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards, literature, Winnie Dunn
The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist
17 May 2025
Ten novels have been included on the 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist, which was published on Thursday 15 May 2025.
- Chinese Postman, by Brian Castro
- The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
- Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
- Dirt Poor Islanders, by Winnie Dunn
- Compassion, by Julie Janson
- Politica, by Yumna Kassab
- Ghost Cities, by Siang Lu
- Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane
- The Degenerates, by Raeden Richardson
- Juice, by Tim Winton
Australia’s oldest literary award, the Miles Franklin honours novels “of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases“. The shortlist will be announced next month on Wednesday 25 June, with the winner being named a month later on Thursday 24 July.
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Australian literature, literary awards, literature, Miles Franklin
Vortex by Rodney Hall wins The Age Book of the Year fiction prize
10 May 2025
Vortex, by Queensland based Australian author Rodney Hall, has won the fiction prize in The Age Book of the Year award for 2025.
The two times winner of the Miles Franklin literary award, says the basis for his latest novel were some pages for a book he started writing, but later gave up on, in 1971. It pays to hold onto those old manuscripts, even the ones you don’t like, or thought you didn’t.
Lech Blaine, also living in Queensland, won the non-fiction prize, with his memoir Australian Gospel.
The announcement of the winners coincided with the opening of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF), on Thursday. The Age Book of the Year awards have a story worthy of a novel themselves. They were first presented in 1974, by The Age newspaper, for fiction and non-fiction writing. In 1993 a poetry award, the Dinny O’Hearn Prize was added.
In 1998, the awards became a feature of the MWF, until they were ceased all together in 2013. However, in 2021 the award was rebooted, but for fiction only. Then in 2022, an award for non-fiction was introduced (or should that be reintroduced?).
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Australian literature, fiction, Lech Blaine, literary awards, literature, Rodney Hall
More Australian publishing plagiarism allegations, this time in cook books
2 May 2025
Australian cook Nagi Maehashi, founder of popular food blog RecipeTin Eats, and publisher of two cook books (her first title was riotously successful), has accused Brisbane based baker Brooke Bellamy, of copying at least two of her recipes.
In addition, Maehashi also claims Bellamy copied “word for word”, a Portuguese tart recipe, published by late Australian chef Bill Granger, in his 2006 cook book, Every Day.
I’m not sure you can copy a recipe for something like Portuguese tarts, but allegedly re-printing one verbatim might be another story:
It has historically been difficult to prove recipe plagiarism, especially when recipes such as baklava, caramel slice and Portuguese custard tarts are not original ideas but versions of traditional recipes that have been tweaked and replicated thousands of times.
Bellamy has denied the plagiarism allegations, saying all recipes in her book, Bake with Brooki, were her own original work.
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Australia, Australian literature, books, Nagi Maehashi
Thomas Mitchell: when your book is used to train AI platforms without permission
14 April 2025
American tech company Meta has been using the works of Australian authors — and no doubt many writers worldwide — to train its AI platforms. This happens, apparently, without consultation with the authors, and certainly — to date — without any payment. Australian author Thomas Mitchell (Instagram link), of Today I F****d Up fame, writes first-hand about the experience:
I have very little in common with Australian author Tim Winton. He has written many books, and I have written one. His titles are bestsellers; my book was mainly purchased by friends and family. He loves the ocean, whereas I am happier on land. Despite our differences, it turns out both Tim Winton and I are part of the same unfortunate club: Australian authors being ripped off by Meta.
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artificial intelligence, Australian literature, books, technology, Thomas Mitchell
Miles Franklin Undercover, a new biography of the Australian author, by Kerrie Davies
14 April 2025
Miles Franklin Undercover, by NSW North Coast based university lecturer and author Kerrie Davies, traces Franklin’s life in the years following the 1901 publication of her iconic novel, My Brilliant Career. Spoiler: things were not too brilliant:
But fame can be deceptive. In reality, the book earned her a pittance. The family farm was sold, her new novels were rejected, and she was broke. Just two years after her debut, Miles disappeared.
On the subject of Miles Franklin, the annual Australian literary award named for her, can’t be too far away from publishing the longlist for the 2025 award. That, I’m guessing, is maybe in a month’s time?
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Australian literature, books, Kerrie Davies, literary awards, Miles Franklin
The 2025 Stella Prize for Australian literature shortlist
9 April 2025
The shortlist for the (stellar) Stella Prize, consisting of six titles, was unveiled last night:
- Black Convicts, by Santilla Chingaipe
- Black Witness, by Amy McQuire
- Cactus Pear For My Beloved, by Samah Sabawi
- Translations, by Jumaana Abdu
- The Burrow, by Melanie Cheng
- Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser
The Stella Prize is an annual celebration of literature written by Australian women. The winner will be announced on Friday 23 May 2025.
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Australian literature, literary awards, Stella Prize
We Are the Stars, Gina Chick, tops 2025 Dymocks Top 101 Book poll
7 April 2025
We Are the Stars, by Australian author Gina Chick, has claimed the number one spot in the 2025 Dymocks Top 101 Books poll. We Are the Stars also enjoys the distinction of being the first work of non-fiction to top the the list in almost twenty years.
Notable fiction inclusions (being titles I’ve also read) in this year’s Top 101 include Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.
Every year, customers of the Australian bookseller vote to determine their favourite titles of the previous twelve months.
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Australian literature, books, literature, novels, Pip Williams, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Meta using the work of Australian authors to train AI platforms
7 April 2025
Two years ago it was ChatGPT being trained with books written by Australian authors, without their knowledge or permission. Now Facebook owner Meta is doing the same thing: using the works of local writers without permission or royalty.
A number of Australian authors, including Sophie Cunningham, Hannah Kent, Tim Winton, Helen Garner, and Alexis Wright, using a tool developed by The Atlantic, have found their work has been added to LibGen, a database Meta is using to “train” its generative AI platform.
The company claims their use of the novels constitutes fair use, as, apparently, only “limited” amounts of copyright material is being used.
If the Meta AI technology in question is what I saw on Instagram a day or two ago, on the search tab, then it’s not much to write home about. I typed my name in to see what would happen, something that appeared to stump the AI platform.
Instead of saying something about me, someone’s who been online here for over twenty-five years — how could Meta’s AI technology possibly not know about that? — it returned a spiel about an English football player called Frank, who has the same surname as I do.
If the writing of some of Australia’s best authors can’t help the technology figure out what day of the week it is, just how useful is this AI platform going to be?
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artificial intelligence, Australian literature, books, technology