AustLit

'I first met Georgia Blain at The Basement. This was back in the 1990s, when the iconic underground jazz venue near Sydney’s Circular Quay still drew a vibrant, edgy crowd. We were young, in our late 20s, and had been invited to read for an event hosted by the Sydney Writers’ Festival; there to be the “bright young things”.'(Introduction)

'Jailbaby – a new play by Suzie Miller – takes a steely look at what happens to an 18-year-old when his life collides with a criminal justice system that is bad and getting worse.' 

'Just over 10 years ago, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard stood up in the House of Representatives to deliver one of the most unforgettable political speeches in recent memory.' (Introduction)

'Grace Tame’s The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner shifts expectations. It’s not a minute-to-minute backstage account of the 12 months Tame spent as Australian of the Year, or the #LetHerSpeak campaign or the March4Justice.'  (Introduction)

'First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen has won the 10th annual Stella Prize with a debut poetry collection that confronts the cultural evasions of an unreconciled Australia with a tender fury.'  (Introduction)

'Literary hoaxes thrive on exposure. At best, they are politically transgressive. They strip away anything smug, pretentious or hypocritical to reveal an uglier reality underneath.' 

'Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch changed lives. Published 50 years ago in October 1970, it exists in the popular imagination as a kind of shorthand for that world-historic moment when women said they’d had enough.' (Introduction)

'There’s a scene in Unjoo Moon’s debut feature I Am Woman, out this week on Stan, where Helen Reddy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) confronts an all-male row of record executives intent on dropping her signature song from her debut album.'

'Words can help us imagine the world more deeply. Even as we retreat into our homes in this time of crisis, words can help us reach out to each other and pile up strength.' (Publication summary)

'Maxine Peake’s character needs to find “another way to be happy”, but she can’t.

'In Julia Leigh’s play Avalanche: A Love Story, based on her 2016 memoir detailing the raw anguish of her six unsuccessful attempts at IVF, these words, though they are kindly intended by her sister (a mother of two), precipitate an angry crisis.' (Introduction)

'Women have been sharing personal stories of sexual assault, abuse and harassment for – well – centuries. But in October 2017, when #MeToo went viral, there was a shift in the way these stories were received.'  (Article summary)

'Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir of a “monstrous” mother has won the 2019 Stella Prize. The Erratics tells the story of Vicki’s return home to a prairie house in the sparse wintry landscapes of Alberta, Canada, where she grew up. Once there, the narrator faces family relationships that are strained to the point of breaking.'  (Introduction)

'Years ago, when I was young, I lived in an apartment in Sydney’s Potts Point that looked straight down into Anne Summers’ house. Summers had recently published her “Letter to the Next Generation” – and it’s likely that any discomfort not arising from the strange proximity of our urban views was directly attributable to this.'   (Publication summary)

'Six years ago, The Stella Prize burst onto the Australian literary scene with an air of urgency. The A$50,000 award was the progeny of the Stella Count – a campaign highlighting the under-representation of women authors in book reviews and awards lists. In the years since, the prize has challenged the gendered ways in which we think about “significance” and “seriousness” in literature.' (Introduction)

'There are certain books that have the knack of getting under your skin. This is why George Bernard Shaw declared Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit to be a far more “seditious” text than Karl Marx’s Das Capital.

'What he was getting at is the power of books to work on your emotions. The intellect can be too cold an instrument to engender empathy, to bring people who are distant from you into your “circle of concern”. And it is precisely this, as philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues, that matters for the pursuit of social justice.

'In 2017, the Stella Prize judges have again come up with a shortlist of books that will engage your brain, but also your heart. They illuminate all the aspects of life that make us frail and vulnerable – sickness, dying, inequality – realities that many of us would prefer to ignore.' (Introduction)

'Clementine Ford is no stranger to speaking out. This makes her a near-perfect poster person for the Stella’s schools program and their latest project Girls Write Up – a day-long wordfest and workshop for high school students – held for the first time this week to sell-out crowds in Sydney and Melbourne. ...' (Introduction)

'In Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947), an epidemic spreads across Oran, a town on Africa’s north coast, as Joseph Grand attempts to write a novel. Grand dreams of writing a book that will cause his publisher to leap up from his desk (the publishers in this world are men), and gasp in wonder.

'But he can’t get the first sentence right. He worries at every detail, frets over meaning and rhythm. He arranges and rearranges it. There is no possibility of a second sentence. Without the first line, the novel is obstructed'