Danielle Binks’ story, ‘Fota’ won 2nd place in the 2015 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. Here is an interview with Danielle, plus her award-winning story! Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? Wearer of Many Hats. I’m a book review blogger over at my own Alpha Reader, a publicist for Wild Dingo Press,…
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On the opening weekend of Adelaide Writers Week, Radelaide is a city of convergence. As well as the Adelaide and Fringe Festivals going live the week before, the Clipsal 500 began two days prior to the first novelist opening her mouth in front of a microphone. It is as if North Terrace is a dividing…
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There’s something about the prevalence of love triangles in young adult fiction that doesn’t sit well with me. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against romance. I love love, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, Kathy and Heathcliff, Romeo and Juliet. But there’s a big difference between a romance and young adult fiction with romantic subplots….
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I don’t know if J K Rowling is really insecure about her work even after all of the success, or just bored and missing good old HP in the spotlight, but for some reason she has decided to backtrack on one of the storylines from the Harry Potter series: namely, who the heroine, Hermione, ended…
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In their yearly count, Vida: Women in Literary Arts have discovered what is already universally acknowledged: that although women read more than men, and books by female authors are published in roughly the same numbers, they are more easily overlooked. Female authors and their books are continuously marginalised by top literary journals, both as reviewers…
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When I first started interning for John Hunter at Hunter Publishers, he asked if I would like to proofread The Best of the Lifted Brow, a selection of pieces from The Lifted Brow to be published in late 2013. I nodded enthusiastically and said, ‘Yes!!!!!!!!!!’ with exactly that number of exclamation marks. The Lifted Brow…
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Last week the Nobel Prize winning author, Doris Lessing died aged 94. During her career that spanned over 70 years, she was awarded a “royal flush” of major literary awards for her 60+ published works, ranging from science-fiction novels, to poetry, to memoirs of her childhood in Africa. The Nobel Prize committee dubbed her ‘that…
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Where shall I take you, I asked, when we are wed? ‘The sea,’ she answered. ‘Will you take me to the sea?’ Oh, I said grandly, oh I will pour out oceans for you. In fairy tales, as in real estate, it is all about location (repeat ad nauseam). Any change, any alteration, any turning…
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Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard is the story of a smart woman who does a bad thing, and, for fear of revealing her indiscretion, finds herself implicated in a far worse crime. Yvonne Carmichael is a scientist at the top of her field, a mother of two grown children and a model wife, that is…
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On Thursday this week, Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In doing so, she became only the 13th woman of 110 Nobel Literature Laureates. The dominance of dead white men is perhaps unsurprising, given the Nobel Academy’s longstanding tradition of selecting writers deemed worthy by the literary canon. Female writers are…
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In a recent and candid interview, Canadian literature professor David Gilmour told Hazlitt that he only teaches ‘guys’. If you’re a woman (with the exception of Virginia Woolf), non-white, queer or even an effeminate male writer, your work will not appear on his syllabus. ‘What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald,…
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I was first introduced to Virago Press through my university studies of women’s literature. Founded in 1973 from the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Virago had the aim of publishing books from women writers. This did not just include new works of literature written by women of the time, but also reissuing older publications…
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I hope you like Mexican food because we don’t have the usual sausage sizzle organized for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award. It is tacos for everyone! Just a few days ago the 2013 Miles Franklin judging panel unveiled an all-female shortlist—the first in the awards 57-year history: Floundering by Romy Ash (Text) Questions…
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Considering that Bloomsday is imminent (16th June), I thought it might be appropriate to produce a short piece of writing on one of my favourite short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners: “The Dead”. It is a story mesmerising in its beauty; its recreation of reality profound. It is, in the minds of many, one of the greatest works of…
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