Showing all posts tagged: literature

More promotion of Australian literary awards benefits authors

28 January 2023

Louise Adler, director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, talking to Katrina Strickland, editor of Good Weekend, laments the lack of wider excitement generated by literary awards in Australia:

“We adore it when our authors win awards but, actually, often they do not translate into sales,” she says, pointing to the way the UK book industry gets behind the Booker Prize longlisted and shortlisted authors. “When the longlist for the Booker is announced the books on it are heavily promoted, booksellers get behind it, publishers get behind it, and then the shortlist is promoted heavily, too. And there’s lots and lots of discussion about them.”

It’s unfortunate Australian literary awards don’t have quite the same buzz surrounding them as the Booker Prize in the UK appears to. While the shortlists, and winners of prizes such as the Stella and Miles Franklin, make headlines when announced, they soon fall out of the news cycle.

No doubt the larger population of the UK, compared to Australia, makes a difference, and Australian authors recognised by local literary awards see a spike in book sales. Still, I doubt it’s anything like the “Booker boost” that writers named on the long and shortlists — and of course, the winner — of the Booker, enjoy.

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The War of the Worlds, invasion literature by H G Wells with an Australian connection

27 January 2023

The War of the Worlds, by H G Wells, bookcover

When people think of The War of the Worlds, the novel written by late British author H. G. Wells, and published by William Heinemann in 1898, after being serialised in 1897, they think of science fiction.

Yet the story of the inhabitants of Mars crossing the interplanetary void to invade Earth — incidentally one of the earliest examples of alien invasion in English literature — isn’t only sci-fi and/or fantasy, The War of the Worlds is also an instance of invasion literature. Also known as invasion novels, invasion literature was common from the later decades of the nineteenth century — following the publication of The Battle of Dorking, written by George Tomkyns Chesney in 1871 — through until the First World War.

Despite being set in England though, Wells drew inspiration for The War of the Worlds from another hemisphere all together, Tasmania, Australia:

Wells later noted that an inspiration for the plot was the catastrophic effect of European colonisation on the Aboriginal Tasmanians; some historians have argued that Wells wrote the book in part to encourage his readership to question the morality of imperialism.

Invasion literature played a part in influencing public opinion in Britain, and other then imperialistic European nations, through their unsettling premises. Stories such as The War of the Worlds, depicting a ruthless invasion of England by a technologically superior enemy, hopefully helped bring home the horrors of colonisation that were being inflicted upon other cultures.

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Good books gone bad, the impact of audiobook narrators

26 January 2023

Usually a novel’s success hangs in a solid storyline, great characterisation, tension, originality, the list goes on. But as Australian writer and editor Fleur Morrison points out, novels in audiobook format face an additional hurdle when it comes to doing well: their narrator.

In other words, if a reader/listener doesn’t like the delivery or style of the narrator, that will affect their experience of the book. Comments about the audiobook narrator often feature in book reviews I see on Goodreads, and while most thoughts I’ve read have been positive, there’s undoubtedly one or two titles that have scored poorly on account of the narration.

Selecting an audiobook narrator certainly isn’t a matter to be treated lightly.

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Australians prefer physical books says Amazon Kindle research

25 January 2023

Amazon Kindle recently quizzed just over one thousand Australians about their reading habits. Here are some of the findings that caught my eye:

  • Almost half those surveyed read fewer than five books in the past twelve months
  • Meanwhile just over five percent said they’d read fifty or more books in the same time frame. That’s almost a book a week, maybe more, for some in that five percent band
  • Sixty-eight percent of respondents read physical books, compared to twenty-two percent who favoured electronic formats
  • Mystery, true crime, and romance, where among the most popular fiction genres. Sadly, poetry barely rated a mention. Literary fiction, apparently, was not assessed
  • About twenty-five percent of people said they read to experience escapism and alternate realities, while not quite forty percent read for relaxation
  • On the other hand, about one percent of respondents said they did not enjoy reading at all. Hmm, ok, I see.

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The Novel Prize for literary fiction 2022 shortlist

21 January 2023

UPDATE: the winners of the 2022 Novel Prize have been announced.

The Novel Prize is a biennial award for works of literary fiction, co-convened by three publishers, Giramondo, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions, based in Australia, Britain and Ireland, and America, respectively. Earlier this week, eight writers, some published, some not, were named on the shortlist for the 2022 prize:

  • Anonymity is Life, Sola Saar
  • Aurora Australis by Marie Doezema
  • Forever Valley by Darcie Dennigan
  • It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken
  • Moon Over Bucharest by Valer Popa
  • Palimpsest by Florina Enache
  • Tell by Jonathan Buckley
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana

Some seven hundred entries were received this year’s award. Of the field, Florina Enache is the only Australian writer to make the cut. Australian author Jessica Au won the inaugural Novel Prize in 2020 for Cold Enough for Snow, which was published, as part of the award, in 2022. The 2022 winner will be announced next month, in February.

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The Booker Prize is seeking a name for their award trophy

21 January 2023

Booker Prize organisers are looking for a name for the statuette they present to recipients of the annual literary award, which was originally designed by late Polish-born British author and artist Jan Pieńkowski. The statuette was presented to inaugural Booker Prize winner P.H. Newby in 1969, but by the mid-1970’s winners were receiving a leather bound copy of their book.

In more recent years, recipients have been presented a perplex trophy. Following Pieńkowski’s death in 2022, organisers resumed using the statuette he designed, when Shehan Karunatilaka was named 2022 winner. Entries for suggested names for the statuette close on Friday 27 January 2023.

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The 2023 Indie Book Awards shortlist

19 January 2023

The Australian literary award season (and quite a long season it is), is underway for the year, with the announcement yesterday of the 2023 Indie Book Awards shortlist. Four titles, in six categories, are in contention this year:

Fiction:

Non-Fiction:

Debut Fiction:

Illustrated Non-Fiction:

Children’s:

Young Adult:

The winners will be named on Monday 20 March 2023.

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Richard Bell, You Can Go Now, a film by Larissa Behrendt

16 January 2023

You may not have heard of Indigenous Australian artist and activist Richard Bell, but he has been at the forefront of political activism for over fifty years. Describing himself as an activist masquerading as an artist, Bell has spent fifty years fighting for Aboriginal rights and self determination, through his art and protest.

One of his best known works, an installation titled Embassy, was inspired by the Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest, which was first established on the lawns outside Australia’s parliament building in 1972. Bell’s installation has been presented in Australia, and cities across the world, including Jakarta, New York, Moscow, and Jerusalem.

Bell’s life and work is now the subject of a documentary, You Can Go Now, trailer, directed by Australian academic, Indigenous advocate, and author, Larissa Behrendt. Behrendt’s most recent novel, After Story, published in 2021, was longlisted in the 2022 Miles Franklin literary award.

You Can Go Now opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 26 January 2023. Bell and Behrendt will also be participating in Q&A preview screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Dendy Cinema, Newtown, on Tuesday 24 January, and the National Film and Sound Archive, in Canberra, on Wednesday 25 January.

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More novels published in the 1990s are being studied at school

13 January 2023

The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and Vanity Fair, are among books commonly studied in high school. Despite their undoubted literary merit, many of these titles were published decades — and in some cases — centuries, ago. But things are changing, and now books written in the nineteen-nineties are beginning to make an appearance.

In the U.S. at least, according to research by The Pudding. The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien in 1990, Woman Hollering Creek, by Sandra Cisneros from 1991, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (also known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), by J.K. Rowling, and published in 1997, are among relatively recent additions to some school reading lists.

Despite the presence of Harry Potter books though, not all inclusions were particularly popular commercially. Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories published in 1999, did not chart on the New York Times Best Seller list, and barely makes the top ten-thousand frequently read books list on Goodreads. Lahiri’s work did however win a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000.

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Voting open in Dymocks Top 101 books 2023 poll

13 January 2023

Voting is open for Australian book retailer Dymocks annual Top 101 books poll. Eligible titles span seven categories being bestsellers, fiction, fantasy and science-fiction, crime, romance, non-fiction, and young adult, and voters have the unenviable task of selecting just ten books for inclusion.

Good luck, and get voting.

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