Showing all posts tagged: Australian literature
Juice: the new cli-fi novel by Australian author Tim Winton
2 October 2024
Juice is the latest novel by Australian author Tim Winton, which was published yesterday. From this synopsis, Juice sounds like it blends elements of the Max Mad saga, with Winton’s own environmental and climate change concerns:
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.
Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
I heard Winton speak about six-and-a-half years ago at the Sydney premiere of Breath, a film based on his 2009, Miles Franklin award winning, novel of the same name. The feature was directed by, and starred, Australian actor Simon Baker, also present that evening.
Winton was one of the screenwriters of the Breath film adaptation. That’s a smart move, get the author of the book being adapted, to co-write the screenplay. Where possible of course. Quite a number of Winton’s books have been made into movies, so it seems like there’s a good chance Juice will follow suit.
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Australian literature, film, novels, Simon Baker, Tim Winton
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood on 2024 Booker Prize shortlist
18 September 2024
Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has gone through to the shortlist of the 2024 Booker Prize, with her novel Stone Yard Devotional, which was announced on Monday 16 September 2024. If Wood were to win the Booker Prize this year, she would become the first Australian author to do so since Richard Flanagan in 2014, with his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The 2024 winner will be named on Tuesday 12 November 2024.
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Australian literature, Booker Prize, Charlotte Wood, literary awards, Richard Flanagan
2024 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards winners
17 September 2024
Anam, by Melbourne based Australian author André Dao, has been named winner in the Fiction category of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Anam was also shortlisted for the Miles Franklin this year, and the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award in 2023.
Winners in other categories were Close to the Subject: Selected Works by Daniel Browning, in Non-Fiction, and We Could Be Something by Will Kostakis, in Young Adult.
Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country, co-authored by Violet Wadrill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Felicity Meakins, Briony Barr, and Gregory Crocetti, took out Children’s Literature. The Cyprian by Amy Crutchfield, and Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country by Ryan Cropp, won in Poetry and Australian History respectively.
The 2024 winners were announced in the Australian capital, Canberra, last week, on Thursday 12 September, with recipients each being awarded eighty-thousand dollars (Australian).
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Australian literature, books, literary awards
Dusk, a novel by Robbie Arnott, being published in October 2024
30 August 2024
Dusk, the new novel by Hobart based Australian author Robbie Arnott, is being published on Tuesday 8 October 2024.
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they’re forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
I’ve read two of Arnott’s previous novels, The Rain Heron — of which Dusk seems slightly reminiscent — and Limberlost. Dusk has duly been added to my TBR list.
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Australian literature, books, literary fiction, Robbie Arnott
Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2024 shortlist
20 August 2024
Do Australian Prime Ministers have time to read books? They may not, but they do have a literary award for Australian publications, created in 2008, of which the 2024 shortlist was announced last week. Five titles, across the six award categories of fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, poetry, children’s, and young adult, were included.
Among books shortlisted are Eventually Everything Connects, by Sarah Firth, in the non-fiction category, and the previously mentioned Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood, in fiction. Welcome to Sex, by Yumi Stynes and Melissa Kang, was included in young adult. The title stirred up controversy last year, after some people objected to certain of the content, claiming some of subject matter was not appropriate for a sex education book.
The backlash was ferocious in some quarters, with staff at some shops selling the title being abused — unacceptable — by would-be customers, while at least one person was convicted of making threats via social media — likewise unacceptable — against co-author Stynes.
The winners of this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will be unveiled on Thursday 12 September 2024.
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Australian literature, Charlotte Wood, literary awards, Sarah Firth, Yumi Stynes
Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Nib Award 2024 longlist
12 August 2024
Seventeen books have been included on the recently announced Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Nib Award 2024 longlist. Also known as the “Nib”, the literary award celebrates excellence in Australian literary research, and as such works of any genre, including fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography, are eligible for inclusion.
- A Very Secret Trade, by Cassandra Pybus
- Alice™ The biggest untold story in the history of money, by Stuart Kells
- Because I’m Not Myself, You See, by Ariane Beeston
- Bennelong and Phillip: A History Unravelled, by Kate Fullagar
- Book of Life, by Deborah Conway
- Crimes of the Cross, by Anne Manne
- Datsun Angel, by Anna Broinowski
- Donald Horne, by Ryan Cropp
- Edenglassie, by Melissa Lucashenko
- Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, by Matthew Lamb
- Killing for Country, by David Marr
- My Brilliant Sister, by Amy Brown
- Reaching Through Time, by Shauna Bostock
- Transgender Australia – A History since 1910, by Noah Riseman
- Wear Next, by Clare Press
- What the Trees See: A Wander Through Millennia of Natural History in Australia, by Dave Witty
- Wifedom, by Anna Funder
A shortlist of six titles will be published on Tuesday 17 September 2024, with the winner being named on Wednesday 27 November 2024.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards
Nothing about Kissing by Kathryn Lomer wins 2024 Furphy literary award
12 August 2024
Hobart based Australian poet, and young adult writer, Kathryn Lomer, has been named winner of the 2024 Furphy literary award for short stories, with her work Nothing about Kissing (PDF).
Set in Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), also in Hobart, Nothing about Kissing, is the story of an unnamed museum cleaner, who’s early morning shift gets off to a rather bad start.
I’m not really into short stories, they’re a hard act to master, but Lomer’s work is, literally, a winner. It’s short enough to read during a refreshment break, so do give it a look.
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Australian literature, books, Kathryn Lomer, literary awards
The Ledge, a new thriller/whodunit by Christian White
8 August 2024
The Ledge is the fourth novel by Victoria based Australian writer, and master of twists that will leave you breathless and dumbfounded: Christian White.
When human remains are discovered in a forest, police are baffled, the locals are shocked and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered.
It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, drawing his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed.
White’s novels are chock full of the things readers of thrillers and suspense love: red herrings, blind alleys, smoke and mirrors, lies, deception, characters with multiple aliases, the list goes on. So far I’ve read The Nowhere Child, White’s 2019 debut, and The Wife and the Widow, which possibly has of one the most mind-blowing twists in the genre.
Wild Place, meanwhile, published in 2021, remains on my TBR list, where it will be joined by The Ledge, when it is published on Tuesday, 24 September 2024.
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Australian literature, authors, books, Christian White, literature, novels
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood included on Booker Prize longlist
6 August 2024
Sydney based Australian author Charlotte Wood has been included on the 2024 longlist for the Booker Prize, with her latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional. It is the first time a work by an Australian writer has featured on the Booker longlist since 2016.
I’m reading Stone Yard Devotional right now, and loving it. Some reviewers however have complained it plods, and is too introspective. The story is about a woman, non-religious, who retreats to a convent in outback Australia for a while to sort out her life. Her musing however, are interrupted by a number of unexpected happenings.
Wood’s 2019 novel The Weekend is another great read, in case you’re on the lookout for book recommendations. It was adapted for the stage, and has been optioned for a screen production.
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Australian literature, Booker Prize, Charlotte Wood, literary awards
The Echoes, a new novel by Evie Wyld, author of The Bass Rock
5 August 2024
London based Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld’s 2021 novel, The Bass Rock, which won the Stellar Prize literary award in the same year, was a riveting read. Her new book, The Echoes, looks like it will follow suit, given it incorporates elements of The Bass Rock, including settings across several locations and time, and a dollop of the supernatural thrown in for good measure:
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him.
In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah is haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seems to offer the potential of a different story, but the past refuses to stay hidden. It finds expression in the untold stories of the people she grew up with, the details of their lives she never knew and the events that broke her family apart and led her to Max.
Both a celebration and an autopsy of a relationship, spanning multiple generations and set between rural Australia and London, The Echoes is a novel about love and grief, stories and who has the right to tell them. It asks what of our past we can shrug off and what is fixed forever, echoing down through the years.
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Australian literature, authors, books, Evie Wyld, literature, novels