Cirrus@Austlit

'Antipodes mourns three important losses to Australian literature in the past six months: the novelist and short story writer Liam Davison, lost in the crash of MH17 over eastern Ukraine; the poet Martin Harrison, who died in September; and the short story writer and novelist Morris Lurie, who passed away in October. Lurie was a comic master who published early on in The New Yorker and was an early reviewer of Peter Carey; Harrison's poetry registered the impact of Australia's natural beauty in as resonant a way as has ever occurred; Davison's The White Woman was one of the most subtle fictional explorations of questions of race, gender, identity, and colonialism in the Australian fictional landscape. All three gave so much to Australian literature; all died too early, and will be much missed.' (Publication abstract)