Showing all posts tagged: Australian writing
Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, by Steven Carroll
14 April 2022
Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight (published by HarperCollins, March 2022), by Melbourne base Australian novelist Steven Carroll, re-imagines a different, perhaps happier, life for Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the troubled first wife of English author and poet, T. S. Eliot.
London, June 1940. With help from friends, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the wife of celebrated poet TS Eliot, is about to effect a daring escape from Northumberland House, the private insane asylum where she has been held for the past four years. Her family, and most particularly her husband, think she’s insane – and maybe she has been, in the past, Vivienne thinks, mad with love, that is, but she is starting to finally feel like herself again.
There is an old law, Vivienne has been told, that if a person can break out of an asylum and stay free for thirty days, proving they can look after themselves, they can’t make you go back. But closing in on Vivienne is the young Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, a man with a hidden past of his own, who has orders to track her down…
Eliot is often referred to, though he does not feature as a character, while the presence of the police officer, Stephen Minter, at times lends Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, the final instalment of The Eliot Quartet, with the feel of a police procedural, says Dennis Haskell, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:
The novel is in part a detective story, but not your usual crime caper. Vivienne’s crime is not really a crime at all; Minter is the opposite of any hard-boiled cop; and Goodnight is not plot-driven. Carroll’s interest is always in character, and his novels are more thoughtful and meditative than dramatic.
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Australian writing, novels, Steven Carroll
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
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
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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Australian writing, Robert Lukins
Naomi Parry Duncan wins Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship 2022
2 March 2022
Blue Mountains based Australian historian and writer Naomi Parry Duncan has been named winner of the 2022 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
The fellowship, which is awarded to Australian biography writers, commemorates late British born Australian writer and biographer Hazel Rowley, who died in 2011.
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Australian writing, biographies, Hazel Rowley, literature, Naomi Parry Duncan
The Bluffs by Kyle Perry optioned for TV series
23 February 2022
Hot on the heels of news that Australian author Liane Moriarty’s 2013 novel The Husband’s Secret will be made into a film directed by Kat Coiro, comes word Tasmanian novelist Kyle Perry’s 2020 debut book The Bluffs, has been optioned by Australian entertainment company First Option Pictures for a limited TV series.
What a great week for Australian fiction.
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Australian writing, Kyle Perry
Veronica Gorrie wins 2022 Victorian Prize for Literature
4 February 2022
Veronica Gorrie has been named winner of the 2022 Victorian Prize for Literature, for her 2021 book Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience, a memoir which recounts her childhood, and service as an Aboriginal officer with the police force in both her home state of Victoria, and Queensland.
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Australian writing, literature, Veronica Gorrie
Words in Progress March 2022, hosted by Declan Fry
2 February 2022
Australian writer and poet Declan Fry hosts a panel discussion with Tara June Winch, Charmaine Papertalk Green, Claire G. Coleman, about their writing processes, on Sunday 20 March 2022, from 4:15PM until 5:15PM.
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Australian writing, Declan Fry, literature
ASA pre-budget submission hopes to boost investment in Australian literature
2 February 2022
It’s incredible to believe that Federal Government investment in Australian literature has declined by forty percent in the last ten years. It is something the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) hopes to redress in a pre-budget submission to the Australian Treasury. Direct grants to authors, and an increase in public lending rights scheme, are two key areas of interest to the ASA:
- Direct authors’ grants: the development of a Commonwealth Fellowships and Grants program which includes a focus on First Nations storytelling, designed to fuel the talent pipeline and build the creative economy of the future.
- A 20% increase to the Federal Government’s Lending Rights Budget to fund the expansion of the public lending rights (PLR) and educational lending rights (ELR) schemes to include digital formats (ebooks and audiobooks), which would modernise the schemes and reflect the reality of library holdings.
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Australian writing, ebooks, literature
Indie Book Awards 2022 shortlist announced
21 January 2022
The shortlist for the Indie Book Awards 2022 has been announced. Winners in the four categories will be named on Monday 21 March 2022.
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