Cirrus@Austlit

'Sometimes you need to leave a place to understand how emotionally important it is to you. I don't mean simply in a 'Home is where the heart is' way. Home for me, I've come to realise, is just as much about where many of my thoughts and memories continue to dwell.' (Publication abstract)

'In a small coastal town where I know almost no-one, in a hipsterish cafe that is becoming all too familiar, I am eavesdropping on two women at a neighbouring outdoor table. Their conversation has drifted from kayaking to the pangs of the empty nest, to the demise of elderly parents, with not a word about decluttering. Their subjects are my subjects, and perhaps because I have lately been alone in a house full of ghosts, I would rather like to join their table.' (Publication abstract)

'The pandemic isn't over. No matter how often we speak of it using the past tense, or how strong our quixotic nostalgia for 'how it used to be'. Despite how oddly clueless we are at assessing actual risk or how much we wish ourselves not to be one of the vulnerable, it persists as a background hum, or a piercing, unshakeable tinnitus. Plans have to change at short notice. Friends are bedridden for days, exhausted for weeks or months. The numbers of cases and deaths, now merely footnotes rather than headlines, continue whether we look at them or not.' (Publication abstract)

'In June 2022, after almost 12 years as a judge of the County Court of Victoria, I retired from that position. COVID hastened my departure as the administration of justice became mired in a blur of protocols, RAT tests, WebEx hearings and the constant risk of infection. Just like any other workplace no doubt, although as one judge observed, it isn't right to sentence an offender to a lengthy term of imprisonment from a kitchen table. From time to time I was sentencing offenders with my Jack Russell, Terry, sitting at my feet. He'd come a long way from the rescue dogs shelter.' (Publication abstract)

'Brian Castro dramatises and even valorises forms of literary and artistic failure throughout his fiction, but his body of work is a raging success by mortal standards. None of his novels disappoint on close inspection. Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing are endlessly rewarding; The Swan Book is gorgeously written and deeply moving; After China is conceptually neat, seductive and stylish. Others, such as Drift and The Bath Fugues, appeal to select readers but are dazzlingly rich and structurally brilliant. Even Stepper—which Castro sees as a relatively conventional spy novel—is a satisfying and affecting Nabokovian game. Every novel is stamped by a talent that induces envy as much as gratitude. You want to know what it feels like to write that way.' (Publication abstract)

'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)

'J.S. Harry was a member of the poetic generation that grew up in the shadow of World War II and did so much to change the poetic landscape as they tried to make sense of the postwar world. Murray was born in 1938, Tranter in 1943, Adamson in 1944 and Robert Gray in 1945. J.S. Harry was born in 1939. Although she made less noise than some of her contemporaries, she created an impact from the beginning of her career. Her first book, The Deer Under the Skin, was published in 1971, as part of an important UQP series under the direction of Roger McDonald, and was immediately praised. Also unlike some of her contemporaries, she knew how to do it from the start: whatever difficulty individual poems might have caused her—she was a careful and meticulous craftsperson—she never had to struggle to develop a style.' (Publication abstract)