I read SO many good books this year … but here are some highlights to inspire your holiday reading. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams – Sparked by the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary, this wonderful tale explores missing words and the lives women lived between the lines. As Esme discovers: language shapes
A breathing place is what poetry offered me in the back half of 2021. Sydney was in lockdown for many months – again – and it was easy to be restless. Easy for anxiety to stagger your breath. Poetry gave me different cadences to hook into. Some of which I’ve sampled here. I make my
‘In a snowy mountain village, my family had lived peacefully for hundreds of years …’ – so begins Karen Hendriks’ new picture book for children aged 7 and upwards. The narrative continues with guards forcing the peaceable villagers to leave their homes taking no more than they can carry. The little girl at the centre
Billy-Ray Belcourt is an NDN from the Driftpile Cree Nation and Canada’s first First Nations Rhodes scholar. He is also an award-winning poet and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at University of British Columbia. The essays in his non-fiction debut, A History of My Brief Body, have the resonance of poetry zinging off the
Award-winning author Ellen van Neerven has gathered a bumper crop of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories in Flock. The refreshing anthology features established and emerging Indigenous writers flexing their creative wings and considering myriad concerns in their fiction, including the joys and struggles of our First Nations people. Van Neerven is of Mununjali Yugambeh (South
COVID restrictions have robbed many of us of our chance to get outdoors and into mysterious places to see wild and wonderful creatures in their element. Next best … read about them. Myth and mystery I’m a reluctant seafarer but love the Hebrides and Philip Marsden writes mesmerically of skippering a wooden sailboat up the
The sea has circled me in my reading – through whorls of beauty like Lucía Estrada’s ‘jellyfish, wide-open’ in ‘Medusa’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘tender water of sleep offered around’ (see below). The ocean is in the poems I’ve explored but also in the novels and non-fiction I’ve been reading. I am thirsty for the sea’s
The Breaking by award-winning author and editor, Irma Gold, was released on March 1. In this Q&A she offers insights into her debut novel’s central love story and how we can stop the harm done to elephants through tourism. The Breaking is a fast-paced love story centred around the intense bond between two young women. Which came
Kirli Saunders wrote Bindi as a call to action for young people to understand their role in conservation and caring for Country. Bindi might only be 11 years old but she is a captivating Indigenous eco-activist – learning as she goes about what it means to be responsible for Mother Earth in the face of climate change,
Here are five things that lifted and lengthened me during lockdown, and in the months since. Bloomin‘ bird “It must be weird to have wings, and not be able to fly.” Penguin Bloom (the movie) is a tear jerker. Naomi Watts plays a devastating Sam Bloom, mother of three, who becomes paralysed from the chest
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