Stella Prize/The Conversation

The Stella shortlist: your guide to 2021’s powerful, emotional books

Our experts cast their eyes over this list of contemporary fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction which undertakes impressive trapeze acts across genre boundaries.
A retouched photo of Mary (Mollie) Dean from Sydney newspaper Truth (1 February 1931). Dean, who was murdered in Melbourne in 1930, was the subject of two Australian books published in 2018. Public domain/The Conversation

Inside the story: humanising a cold case victim – writing the life and brutal death of Mollie Dean

True crime-related storytelling has shrugged off its former low-brow baggage. Two recent Australian books show how victims’ stories can be told sensitively and humanely.
Nurse Ratched in the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Netflix is now producing a TV series built around this character, to star Sarah Paulson. Fantasy Films

Friday essay: saints or monsters, pop culture’s limited view of nurses

To the public, nursing is much like teaching work – known to be valuable, but not worthy of much critical attention. Accordingly, nursing is rarely represented in any depth in popular culture.
Writing programs don’t just produce strong writers, they produce critical thinkers with strong skills for the workplace. mpclemens/Flickr

University writing programs deliver, so let’s turn the page

Whether creative writing can be taught is a question that has been debated on and off for decades. Are writers born, is the question, or can they be made? Neither side of the debate has offered incontrovertible…

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