Watching Lena Dunham’s Girls for the first time was an edifying experience. A large part of the show’s appeal for me—and perhaps for countless other teenagers and women in their early twenties—is its flawed and often hapless characters, who are relatable precisely because of their faults. Here was Hannah Horvath: podgy, solipsistic beyond help,…
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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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A few years ago, Melbourne Books began compiling the country’s prize-winning stories and publishing them in an annual collection called, Award Winning Australian Writing (AWAW). Last year, they added poems to the mix. It’s such a wonderful idea I don’t know why it wasn’t done sooner. The series is now in its fifth year. There are…
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In this week’s column, I’m looking at a new publishing platform which emerged from the digital book boom. There is no question that the boom has brought about a plethora of new digital publishers and new self-publishing opportunities. However, short story download site Alfie Dog Fiction, launched in May this year, are doing things a…
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I don’t like reading fantasy. It is not that I don’t have an imagination; it is simply a matter of plausibility. I don’t find fantasy plausible and I would much rather read about something with some connection to the real world (no matter how small) than something set in a completely different world. I was…
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