AustLit is the premier resource for all those interested in Australian literary culture. AustLit is created by experts , and is constantly updated. New records are added as Australian literature is produced, and research continues to upgrade author and work records with more detailed information.

During 2000 and 2001, the AustLit service has been developed by combining a number of Australian literary information services. This massive effort has been undertaken by a national team, and has created a cohesive, flexible, high quality and technically sophisticated Australian literature service.

Use AustLit to find:

• authors (and organisations), including many dates and places of birth or death (or establishment/disestablishment), alternative writing names, biographical or organisational details, and summaries of works, classified for detailed retrieval
• bibliographic description of creative and critical writing published in a full range of sources, including books, collections, journals, newspapers and electronic publications
• works about particular subjects, classified using our sophisticated thesaurus
• full text retrieval for hundreds of individual works, growing extensively over the next year
• authors and works in specialist areas
• information on library holdings of books and journals, courtesy of the National Library of Australia, and our dynamic link with the National Bibliographic Database via KiNETICA, and
• to undertake sophisticated searches across many of these areas.

Peter Carey has become the second writer to win a second Booker Prize, taking out the award for his True History of the Kelly Gang.

An administrative error caused prominent author Frank Moorhouse considerable anguish, after he was erroneously told that his novel Dark Palace had been awarded the Victorian Premier's Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for 2001. In fact, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang won the award. Carey's initial comments on Moorhouse's reaction to the error were ascerbic, but he has softened his stance, noting that his concerns about his home city of New York following the terrorist attacks of September 11 had influenced his choice of words.

See AustLit's citations on this issue:

• Susan Wyndham in the SMH
• Susan Wyndham and Raymond Gill in the SMH
• Jane Sullivan in the Age, and
• Frank Moorhouse in the Age

Nick Enright's stage adaptation of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is being staged in New York in October as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 'Next Wave Down Under Festival'.

See AustLit's citations on this issue:

• Misha Schubert in the Australian
• Bruce Weber in the New York Times

Many excellent Australian literature websites are created by individuals or small organisations. Please be patient with download times, and try again if you have difficulty accessing these services.

Visit Yvonne Miels' excellent Amy Witting Website which includes a biography, comprehensive bibliography, synopses of works and information about manuscript holdings.

To locate Australian literary manuscript collections, search National Library's Register of Australian Archives and Manuscripts. For more detailed information about nearly one hundred Australian literary manuscript collections, and to simultaneously search detailed guides to collections, visit the University of Western Australia's Guide to Australian Literary Manuscripts.

Find more than four hundred photographs and portraits of Australian writers from many Australian image collections by following the Literary Trail at PictureAustralia.

Amy Witting, author of the award winning novel I for Isobel and of the Patrick White Award for 1993, died on September 18, at the age of 83.

Patsy Adam-Smith, cultural historian and chronicler of Australian working class life, died on September 20.

Axel Clark, son of Manning and Dymphna Clark, Australian literature academic, and biographer of Christopher Brennan and Henry Handel Richardson, died on October 24.

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We welcome your feedback on our new service, and will work hard to develop content and services to meet your needs. If you have any comments and suggestions, please contact us at:

info-austlit@austlit.edu.au