Richard Flanagan is a natural raconteur. While some of his essays seethe with anger, his passion for literature is infectious.
- Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
The Trap delights in a Dickensian world of grifters and chancers, crooked cops and witty hookers
We found out the favourite 2025 books of 35 expert readers – and the Books & Ideas team shares our own picks, too.
David Brooks, winner of the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, recalls his friendship with AD Hope and recounts falling in love with Patrick White.
The inexorable passage of an incorruptible body gives this strange, spare story its shape.
We’ve invited writers, from fields as diverse as wildlife ecology, politics and literature, to nominate their best books of 2024. And this year, the Books & Ideas team share their own picks, too.
The books of Brian Castro are postmodern pantomimes that mug the dictates of genre, without ever quite escaping them.
We are accustomed to regarding history as linear, punctuated by moments, events and personages. What if this is not what is happening?
We were dismayed to see no Australians on the New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century – so, with the help of 50 experts, we created our own, all-Australian list. You can have your say, too!
The intriguing stories in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts bring obscure historical footnotes to life.
From Russian Doll to Severance, a spate of conceptual TV series are rehearsing thought experiments challenging our assumptions about the world.
Plan your summer reading or catch up on what you missed with The Conversation’s selection of the best books of the year.
In The Idealist, the machinations of the Australian government become a sinister backdrop to what seems to be a story of liberation.
In her latest book, Sarah Krasnostein goes straight for the soul of Peter Carey’s writing.
Kim Mahood understands that frontiers have always been places of interchange, where overt power disparities often come disquietingly undone.
With its lovingly rendered characters and sharp aphoristic prose, Sweeney and the Bicycles is a study in radical self-absorption.
A new collection of non-fiction by one of Australia’s greatest poets enriches our understanding of her legacy.
Set in the smoky shadow of Australia’s 2019 and 2020 bushfire season, Flanagan explores the loss of our world through the shattering of a family.
If you were in charge of the new parliamentary book club, what Australian book would you want your representative to read? Our experts weigh in.
The University of Queensland Press has a peerless record of discovering, nurturing and supporting Australian writers. A new anthology is a cross-section of many of their writings.
The powerful ideological connection between Australia and agriculture is being increasingly scrutinised. A spate of recent books have recast basic assumptions about our relationship to the land.
In two 30-year periods, an area in WA roughly the size of England was stripped of native vegetation for farming. It has produced some of our finest writers, from A.B. Facey to Dorothy Hewitt to Jack Davis.
The Museum of Water invites people to bring samples of water significant to them.
Protest poetry has an esteemed history, from the British war poets to writers behind the Iron Curtain. In Perth, poets are protesting against a contentious road extension and their words are charged.
This morning the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, won the 2014 Man Booker prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The novel centres on one of the key events in Australia’s war…
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