AustLit

'A group of young creatives who cut their teeth on an industry magazine more than a decade ago are making waves in the world of film, writes Michael Bodey.'

'Dealing with everything from the insults of age to child murder, Helen Garner’s latest essay collection is masterful, writes Peter Craven.'

'Two first-time novelists have brought their experience and fascination to works set far from home. Tony Grey’s The Tortoise in Asia takes place in the last century BC along the Silk Road... Debra Jopson, who won a Walkley Award for independent journalism in 2014, "spent part of her childhood in Beirut and continued to visit her family there during the first rounds of the 1970s Lebanon civil war." She has drawn on those memories for Oliver of the Levant (Peter Pierce).

'Precisely why the story of the Titanic continues to exercise such a powerful hold on the collective imagination is a fascinating question. The answer lies, at least in part, in the way it simultaneously enacts and contradicts a series of fantasies about the passing of the Gilded Age, setting the hubris of the ship’s owners’ claims about its unsinkability against the images of doomed nobility and chivalry that are embodied in the image of the band playing on as the ship slid beneath the waves... Dyer isn’t the first writer to venture into this territory, although as a former ship’s officer and lawyer who spent many years working in the London firm that represented the Titanic’s owners, he may be the most qualified' (James Bradley).