I’m picky when it comes to crime novels. If there isn’t a delightful balance between character, believability and suspense, I’m apt to put the book down and forget about it. Thankfully, Good Money by J.M. Green balances all of these elements. Green is a debut author whose book was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s…
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Katelin Farnsworth’s short story ‘Round’ won Lip’s 2015 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. Here is an interview with Katelin, plus her award-winning story! Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? Hi! I’m Katelin and I’m a writer from Melbourne. I’m currently studying Professional Writing & Editing, trying to complete my first novel, and…
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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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Ali Zayaan’s story, ‘Excerpts’ won 3rd place in the 2015 Rachel Funari Prize for Fiction. Here is an interview with Ali, plus his award-winning story! Tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you? I study Econ and Politics at Adelaide Uni. I love writing like I have loved very few things ever in life…
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Anita Heiss, prolific author and Aboriginal activist, was in 2009 accused by columnist Andrew Bolt of being one of a group of ‘political aborigine[s]’: white people who claim to be black. Bolt decided that Heiss only identified as a ‘member of the Wiradjuri nation’ to nab top jobs reserved for Indigenous people (disregarding her high…
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Suki, at first glance, seems to be about very little. The new novel from fabulist Suniti Namjoshi has a minuscule cast of characters: for most of the tale there’s just a narrator—the unnamed, author-analogue ‘S’—and a subject—S’s cat and the titular Suki. S is a writer of fables and poetry who spends her days scribbling…
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I recently spent five nights in what felt like the middle of nowhere, with no phone reception and no internet. Okay, so phone reception was just a ten minute drive up a hill if I needed it, but I found I didn’t, unlike some of the other adults I was staying with. Usually, teenagers are…
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For all the many thousands of words that make up the twelfth volume of :etchingsmelb, there is one word that perfectly sums it up: eclectic. The latest iteration of the literary journal skips merrily from the collage of Australiana that is the opening short story by Simonne Michelle-Wells, ‘Under a Dreaming Sky’, all the way…
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Christie Thompson’s debut novel relates contemporary Australian adolescence with brutal honesty. As her characters come of age in the grimy outer suburbs of Canberra in 2009, they manifest all the ennui and self-sabotage of the teen years. 17-year-old Jez is bored and disaffected. Her days in a suburb on the fringes of the national capital…
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Okay, so I once tweeted that any Faulkner novel was most certainly pretentious artwank at its finest but, in fact, I secretly quite like Faulkner’s novels. Specifically, I quite like As I Lay Dying, first published in 1930. (I am cursing that I do not live in New York because James Franco—*swoons, suppresses inner fangirl*—has…
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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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Skagboys is the latest offering from Irvine Welsh, who burst onto the literary scene with the notorious Trainspotting (1993). Skagboys revisits the characters of Trainspotting, trailing them on a manic journey into the Edinburgh’s drug scene. Welsh describes it as a “why” book, investigating the characters, relationships and the broader society that the characters inhabit….
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Does any women have complete power over her choices? The agency and reproductive rights of women come into question in Maureen McCarthy’s YA novel The Convent. McCarthy writes in her “Author’s Note”: ‘History is so often told from the male point of view, with the female experience either ignored or trivialised.’ In The Convent, she…
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Ida Jessen is a popular and award-winning Danish author whose 2009 work, The Children, has recently been published in English. Beginning in 1992, The Children opens with recently divorced Solvej renting a house in isolated Hvium so she can be with her daughter, Christiane. While Solvej is eager to find a place to belong, her…
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