I first walked on the bare rocks of the Burren on the West Coast of Ireland before I knew I had Irish heritage and the tug of that landscape has been more intense than any other. Some of the most powerful scenes in The Green Road, by Irish author Anne Enright, are set in and
Station Eleven might well be the book for readers who gave up on The Road because the post-apocalyptic world Cormac McCarthy painted was so austere they couldn’t see past the misery to engage with the issues this fabulous novel raised. Emily St. John Mandel’s apocalypse is a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the
‘What is it in us—what urge to lose ourselves in the otherness of things—that leads us so insistently to seek out encounters with paintings, plays, poems, novels, works of sculpture, dance, music?’ asks the Australian author David Malouf in his essay ‘Questions on the Way to the Exhibition’. This essay appears in Being There, the
‘You are what you read,’ writes Malcolm Knox in The Simple Act of Reading. ‘By digesting books I am creating myself.’ Knox is one of 21 writers in this anthology who explain how reading has shaped their identities and writing. And here’s my A to Z of why Debra Adelaide’s handpicked homage to reading should
A friend wants me to take a trip to Bunyah to visit the internationally lauded Australian poet Les Murray on his home turf. In the meantime, let’s hit the road with Murray’s latest poetry collection Waiting for the Past and see what vistas open up along the way … What sort of road trip are
At the Sydney Writers Festival last week, Tegan Bennett Daylight said The Golden Age was the best Australian novel she’d read in a long time. I also loved this superb story set in a children’s polio convalescent home and hope it scoops this year’s Miles Franklin Award to be announced on June 23. Don’t be
This week Spineless Wonders released my award-winning story ‘We’re All Travellers Here’, the first in its series of 12 long eStories selected by Michael McGirr. The story won the 2014 Carmel Bird Award announced in January 2015. Award judge, Michael McGirr, said the story was ‘a terrific achievement which makes great use of cultural history
The Sydney Writers’ Festival is done and dusted for another year but you can find lasting traces (in the form of photos and grabs) on A Bigger Brighter World’s Facebook page. You’ll find Don Watson speaking with Eleanor Hall about his book The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia, a poetic tour de force,
A Bigger Brighter World has been pushing through crowds and shuffling along queues with sticky-noted books at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this week. Pictured here are the stars of the second day at the Carrington Hotel stage of the Varuna and Sydney Writers’ Festival. For more photos of the authors, pop over to our Facebook
Tim McGarry’s recent performance of Mark O’Flynn’s short story ‘Iago’ at the monthly literary soiree in Sydney that is Little Fictions was ‘Part jester part Shakespearean tragic’—to steal the words of Spineless Wonders’ Publisher Bronwyn Mehan. But how do actors like McGarry enflesh a character when they read another person’s story to a live audience
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