Unlike ABC’s Q&A, the panel for the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction is chockers with excellent women. Over the next few weeks, Lip will be getting to know our judges, so you can meet the writers who will be reading your work. This week we are featuring Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of Foreign Soil. What are you working on in 2015?…
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Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel Hausfrau opens with the line, ‘Anna was a good wife, mostly.’ This ‘mostly’, read like an afterthought, hints at the entire novel’s focus—the good wife as a platform for exploring patriarchy, free will and the psychology of adultery. Anna Benz is the trademark oppressed woman more commonly found in Flaubert…
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Unlike ABC’s Q&A, the panel for the Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction is chockers with excellent women. Over the next few weeks, Lip will be getting to know our judges, so you can meet the writers who will be reading your work. This week we are featuring Melissa Lucashenko, author of Mullimbimby. What have you got planned for…
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According to Martin Amis, that sharp satirist and white male English literary giant, there are two things that literature can’t do. The first is sex. Amis agrees with his father, Kingsley (that bigoted white male English literary giant), who believed that sex has the effect of de-universalising the reading experience. Good sex, Amis junior opines,…
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‘I’m losing my yesterdays…so what I have to say today is timely.’ – Alice Howland It is a brave thing to write a book about Alzheimer’s disease. The topic is heartbreaking enough in itself, as the disease has no known cure. It is also a dangerous representation to get wrong, as with all representations…
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The announcement that Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman, will be published in July is the biggest literature news in years. Not since the release of the last Harry Potter novel has the mainstream media spent so much time talking about a book. The revelation that Lee has had another novel hidden away…
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Janice MacLeod’s memoir, Paris Letters, is resplendent with insights, humour and creativity, and has a lot to teach us about the modern attitude towards work. At 34, MacLeod was a copywriter on the periphery of career burnout. Like a numb trolleybus, being wheeled from one place to another, she was sifting from one folder to the next, without accruing…
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Fables: Queer and Familiar follows two lesbian grandmothers, their family and friends, and how the interact with the sociopolitical climate of Australia. The stories, written by Margaret Merrilees and based on her radio series Adelaide Days, deals with Australian politics, environmental issues, and LGBT literature. Set in modern day Australia, Julia and Anne are two…
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The same night Banjo walks out on his wife Jade, he is killed by a hit and run driver. But his spirit remains, and he is compelled to watch Jade slip into a depression while their daughters struggle to hold things together. Even in death, Banjo aches with love for his wife, despite knowledge of…
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‘Great Hera! I am running so late today!’ ‘Aphrodite aid me in getting through this after-lunch meeting!’ ‘Suffering Sappho I am exhausted!’ Not curses we hear in today’s world – but wouldn’t we all secretly love to make such glorious exclamations? Wonder Woman did. In Jill Lepore’s readable new book The Secret History of Wonder…
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Although a powerful form of expression, poetry remains a misunderstood and underappreciated art form. This deeply personal publication by Gwyndyn Alexander is essentially an answer to a question – put forth by a man of, in her words, the ‘scientific sort’ – querying the function of poetry. What is a poet? What is the point…
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Frances and her partner Charlie have left their old lives to start over in Sydney. Coming from Melbourne, with its grid-mapped streets and dark, sensible fashions, Frances feels like an outsider in a city that yields to the natural landscape. On lonely spring days she takes her rescue dog, Rod, for long walks…
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Every now and then, a Twitter hashtag gets real. It exposes injustice. It strips back a culture to bare experience. On the feminist scene we’ve heard stories from thousands of women through #everydaysexism and #yesallwomen – the newest hashtag to make waves is #writingwhilefemale. It’s the brainchild of Foreign Soil author, Maxine Beneba Clarke. ‘Despite…
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New Zealand author Lloyd Jones seems fascinated by art’s capacity to bring men and women together. It’s a theme which drives his 2008 novel Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance in which the tango becomes a way to survive WWI. The idea also surfaced as the focus of his novel…
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