AustLit logo
Peter Craven Peter Craven i(A8523 works by)
Born: Established: ca. 1951 ;
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Gutsy Take on the State We’re In Peter Craven , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 3 February 2024; (p. 13)

— Review of Justice and Hope : Essays, Lectures and Other Writings Raimond Gaita , 2023 selected work essay criticism
1 New Books for Summer Reading Peter Craven , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Quadrant , January/February vol. 66 no. 1/2 2024; (p. 99-106)

— Review of The Pole and Other Stories J. M. Coetzee , 2023 selected work short story
1 David Marr's Penance by Storytelling Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Eureka Street , 16 October vol. 33 no. 20 2023;

— Review of Killing for Country : A Family Story David Marr , 2023 multi chapter work criticism

'In Killing for Country, David Marr confronts Australia's dark colonial past, revealing unsettling truths about the Australian Native Police's brutal acts. Published during the Voice referendum, Marr intertwines personal ancestry with national guilt, urging Australians towards truth-telling and reconciliation. This isn't just history; it's a call for atonement.' 

1 The Man behind Bond Peter Craven (interviewer), 2023 single work interview
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 7-8 October 2023; (p. 7)

'Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare tells Peter Craven how he made sense of British author Ian Fleming – a man almost as enigmatic as his singular creation: James Bond' 

1 Personal Odyssey of Mum and Motherland Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16-17 September 2023; (p. 23)

— Review of God Forgets About the Poor Peter Polites , 2023 single work novel

'It might come as news to the deity that the poor are a forgotten item. Yet Peter Polites, in a rather dumbfoundingly awkward book, is keen to press the case for poor suffering Greeks, both at home and in their diaspora, and for the poverties of spirit and material circumstance they have, God knows, endured.' (Introduction)

1 Truth, with Great Flashes of Scarlet Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 12-13 August 2023; (p. 15)

— Review of Restless Dolly Maunder Kate Grenville , 2023 single work novel
1 Diseased Organs at War Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 5-6 August 2023; (p. 15)

— Review of The Vitals Tracy Sorensen , 2023 single work prose
1 Dennis Glover Thaw Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 12-18 August 2023;

— Review of Thaw Dennis Glover , 2023 single work novel

'Captain Robert Scott’s second doomed expedition to the South Pole is the stuff of legend. He and his comrades were beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen and then died in extraordinary blizzard conditions. The saga is the subject of what’s generally reckoned to be a literary masterpiece – The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard – and its enactment of pain and heroism is central to Patricia Cornelius’s play Do Not Go Gentle, in which the struggle becomes a metaphor for the emotional life of a group of people in an aged-care home.' (Introduction)

1 Heart-stopping Tale of Love, Loss Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 8-9 July 2023; (p. 13)

— Review of The Pole and Other Stories J. M. Coetzee , 2023 selected work short story
1 Jurassic Lark Peter Craven , 2023 single work column
— Appears in: The Monthly , May 2023; (p. 62-63)
1 Quaint, Queer Portrait of a Butterfly Fenian Hero Peter Craven , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 11-12 February 2023; (p. 19)

— Review of A Man of Honour Simon Smith , 2023 single work novel

'In 1869, just after the American Civil War and just before Anna Karenina appeared, Henry James O’Farrell, Irish by birth and affiliation but long domiciled in Australia, took a shot at Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, one of the younger sons of Queen Victoria, who was visiting Sydney at the time.' 

1 Helen Garner, Robert Hughes and the Mystery of Nonfiction Peter Craven , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , December vol. 81 no. 4 2022; (p. 196-208)

'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the 'aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

1 Gritty but Gratifying Journey on the Road to Revelation Peter Craven , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 16 July 2022; (p. 21)

— Review of Mystery Road : Origin Blake Ayshford , Steven McGregor , Kodie Bedford , Timothy Lee , 2022 series - publisher film/TV
1 Horses for Courses : Geraldine Brooks’s Highbrow Detective Story Peter Craven , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 444 2022; (p. 40-41)

— Review of Horse : A Novel Geraldine Brooks , 2022 single work novel

'Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that underline the Passion that is dramatised.'(Introduction)   

1 Magician of the Mundane Peter Craven , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19 March 2022; (p. 14)

— Review of Continuous Creation : Last Poems by Les Murray Les Murray , 2022 selected work poetry

'Les Murray was a mesmerising poet because he had a technique that could encompass the world. He had a magical sense of music and of rhythm as a driving force.'

1 The Future Is Here Peter Craven , 2022 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 5 February 2022; (p. 6)
1 The Necromancy of Solipsism : Gerald Murnane’s Shameless Aesthetic Privacies Peter Craven , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 438 2021; (p. 41)

— Review of Last Letter to a Reader Gerald Murnane , 2021 selected work criticism essay

'No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation.' (Introduction)

1 Watching Peter Craven , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2021; Meanjin , Summer vol. 80 no. 4 2021;

'It’s one of the paradoxes of cultural history that we are forever denying whatever is transforming the way we experience the world. Just at the moment (though it’s been a long moment) we’re worried about smartphones—the porn, the bullying, the hook-ups with God knows who to do God knows what, the trolls and the pervs and the endless nervy distraction.'  (Introduction)

1 An Adelaide Writer on the World Stage Peter Craven , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 24 July 2021; (p. 17)

— Review of Life as Art : The Biographical Writing of Hazel Rowley Hazel Rowley , 2021 selected work biography

'Hazel Rowley is the most heroic figure in the history of Australian biography. This woman, who died freakishly of what looked like a chill 10 years ago in New York, turned herself into a biographer of international stature out of a sheer passion to tell the truth about human life as a nonfiction narrative. Her sister, Della Rowley, and a close friend, Lynn Buchanan, have put together a collection of her pieces. They are not chronological; they’re repetitious and follow no set order, but they have a luminous and obsessive power.' (Introduction)

1 Playwright Joanna Murray-Smith Peter Craven , 2021 single work column
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 10-16 April 2021;

'Joanna Murray-Smith is indisputably one of Australia’s international theatre stars. I knew someone who compared her to the Duchesse de Guermantes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: a figure of fugitive but irrevocable glamour.' (Introduction)

X