Five Bells is an elegy for Kenneth Slessor’s friend Joe Lynch, an artist who drowned in Sydney Harbour in 1927 after falling from a ferry.
- Professor in Australian Literature and Writing, The University of Queensland
Contrary to popular belief, poetry doesn’t have to rhyme – and rhyme is not a marker of quality, or ease. Some of the world’s most famous poetry proves it.
Are judges of literary awards and fellowships now being asked to assess not just the work, but the writer too?
Australia’s long-running literary flagship program – Poetica on Radio National (RN) – is slated for axing in 2015. It’s one more casualty of the cuts to the ABC budget, announced last week. For the first…
When Jane Caro compared traditional marriage to prostitution on a recent episode of Q&A, she did not mean to conflate today’s stay-at-home mothers with sex workers. But that didn’t stop the loud handful…
My research is largely in the field of poetry and poetics, so not surprisingly poetry frequently makes its way into The Mind Field. I’m particularly interested in times that poetry hits not the literary…
You could forgive a reader for thinking that journalists were writing about 16-year-old Lorde who topped the US charts last week with her song Royals, not a 28-year-old writer who already has an award-winning…
The world of letters is in shock to learn that Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s best-loved poet, died on Friday at age 74. “The death has taken place of Seamus Heaney,” publisher Faber and Faber said on behalf…
While Kevin Rudd was in Darwin proclaiming the need for “a national imagination” to grasp the economic potential of northern Australia, his Arts Minister, Tony Burke, was in Brisbane to celebrate the nation’s…
But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road, / really exaggerated in their beauty - Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Questions of Travel’ After a week of rampant sexism in the media…
Well this is curious. Women outnumbered men on the Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist by 4:1, and now the judges - for the first time in the Award’s 57-year history - have turned out a shortlist that…
On an autumn day in 1914 Laurence Binyon sat on a cliff in North Cornwall, somewhere between Pentire Point and the Rump. It was less than seven weeks after the outbreak of war, but British casualties were…
The Stella Prize, which comes with a whopping $50,000 purse, is Australia’s newest literary prize celebrating Australian women authors. Australia’s other “gendered” prizes for literature include The Kibble…
I admit it: I was wrong. I was satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason would win the 2012 Bad Sex in Fiction Awards for his ikebana-cum-gymnastic efforts in his…
Poets and writers get twice the sex of regular mortals, according to a study led by Dr David Nettle of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B…
While the guests at the 2012 Man Booker Prize award ceremony dinner in London tucked-in to roasted leg of lamb, potato mille feuille, confit turnip and jugs of Madeira jus, I and book bloggers around the…
Some of the names thrown around were Haruki Murakami from Japan - author of Norwegian Wood and, most recently, 1Q84, a novel about a woman who slips into an alternate reality; Margaret Atwood or better…
Campbell Newman might have hoped the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards were dead, buried and cremated: the allocated prize pool of $230,000 shared across 14 categories had been scratched from his budget…
“Style,” Gore Vidal defined, “is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” And that is precisely how Vidal – daring, bawdy, an intellectual swashbuckler – lived his life, which…
In 1914 Apollinaire encountered a beautiful young aviator – he called her Lou – and launched one of poetry’s legendary, if doomed, love affairs. Lou fuelled and participated in his erotic fantasy life…
At first glance the phrase ‘best-selling poetry book’ looks oxymoronic. Anyone with a vague sense of book publishing is acquainted with the orthodoxy that poetry doesn’t sell: readers don’t want to read…
“Poetry makes nothing happen”. It’s the most often quoted line of W.H. Auden’s famous elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” - it could even be the most quoted line of his career. People draw on it when they…
If ever there was a doubt that bookmakers (as in bet-takers, not publishers) are the clear-eyed prophets of the future, it should be put to bed now. Online bookie Tom Waterhouse called Anna Funder as the…
MILES FRANKLIN REVIEW: The winner of the 2012 Miles Franklin Award will be announced this week. In preparation, The Conversation brings you academic reviews of the five novels shortlisted for Australia’s…
Just because it’s the debate we had to have, didn’t mean it wasn’t going to hurt. The fracas began in 2011 when the Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, unveiled its all-male…
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