Showing all posts about books
Pictures of You, a collection of short stories by Tony Birch
7 June 2025
Hailing from Melbourne, Australian author Tony Birch has been writing books since 2006. Pictures of You, being published on Tuesday 30 September 2025, is a retrospective of his best short stories written over the last twenty years. I should think that will be quite a few.
Cherrypicking from across his oeuvre, this anthology showcases his skills at finding the extraordinary in ordinary lives, and the often-unexpected connections and kindnesses between strangers. His work is by turns poignant, sad, profound and funny — and always powerful. Throughout this stellar collection, Birch’s preoccupation with the humanity of those who are often marginalised or overlooked, and the search for justice for people and the natural environment shines bright.
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Australian literature, books, fiction, literature, short stories, Tony Birch, writing
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser wins 2025 Stella Prize
24 May 2025
Sydney based author Michelle de Kretser has been named winner of the 2025 Stellar Prize, for her 2024 novel, Theory & Practice, a novel Stella judges say does not read like a novel:
In her refusal to write a novel that reads like a novel, de Kretser instead gifts her reader a sharp examination of the complex pleasures and costs of living.
The novel that does not read like a novel, is indeed a curious work:
It’s 1986, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students — and Kit. He claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray. Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.
Established in 2013, the Stellar Prize, which is awarded annually, honours the work of Australian women and non-binary writers.
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Australia, Australian literature, books, literary awards, Michelle de Kretser, Stella Prize
Should cook book writers sue each other for plagiarism or AI chatbots?
22 May 2025
Malcolm Knox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, regarding accusations of plagiarism made by Sydney based Australian cook Nagi Maehashi against Brisbane counterpart Brooke Bellamy:
Nagi and Brooke will be out of their jobs when Microsoft, Google, Meta and the rest of big tech develop AIs to deliver the same caramel slice recipe, at zero cost, provided by an “author” whose personality combines the best of Julia Child, Margaret Fulton, Yotam Ottolenghi, even Nagi and Brooke.
Knox has a point. Perhaps the cooks should be more concerned about the mass appropriation of copyrighted material, without permission or recompense, rather than the alleged wrongdoing of one person, which may be near nigh impossible to prove. Not that the odds of prevailing against big tech would be any better.
I write this in the wake of another AI chatbot surge of activity on this website a few nights ago. Several hundred posts were presumably indexed in a matter of minutes, in the name of machine learning. Sometimes if something I posted here has been used as the basis for a question posed to an AI bot, a link to the source material is supplied with the answer generated.
At least I score a visit or two out of it all.
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artificial intelligence, Australian literature, books, technology
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
disassociated is listed in the Internet Phone Book: call me on 492
19 May 2025
Image courtesy of Ana Šantl.
disassociated has been included in the inaugural edition of the Internet Phone Book, a directory of over seven-hundred personal websites and blogs, compiled by Kristoffer Tjalve, and Elliott Cost.
An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.
You don’t read a great deal of poetry on my website, but Tjalve and Cost offer a definition of poetic in this interview with Meg Miller of Are.na, publishers of the book.
Being a phone directory, each listed website naturally comes with a “phone number”, a three digit code allocated by the authors, a kind of short-cut link, that lets you “call” through, I’m on 492.
As of the time I type, the book has sold out through the publisher’s website (I think another print is in the works), though it is available from selected stockists across Europe, and in South Korea.
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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 best books of the twenty-first century, so far, according to Kirkus Reviews
2 May 2025
Kirkus Reviews, an American literary publication, founded by teacher and editor Virginia Kirkus in 1933, has published a list of the best books — so far — of the twenty-first century.
It alarms me, as somewhat of a book reader, that I have not read even one of the fiction titles they list. I have seen a few of the film adaptations of some books though.
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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
The Emperor of Gladness, a new novel by Ocean Vuong
30 April 2025
The Vietnamese American writer’s second novel will be published next month:
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. Six years seems like a bit of time between drinks, but Vuong also published a book of poetry, Time Is a Mother, in 2022.
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books, literature, novels, Ocean Vuong, writing
This is For Everyone, a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee
29 April 2025
This is For Everyone, being published this September, is the memoir of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The title, I think, belongs on the TBR list of anyone with any interest in the web.
The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.
Not only did the British computer scientist bring us the web, he also created HTML, URLs, and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), all of which makes it possible to see this very web page.
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