Cirrus@Austlit

'A living songbook more than four years in the making, Andrew Ford’s hymnal brings together the words of sixteen contemporary Australian writers – poets, essayists and folksingers – in songs of praise, awe, grief, hope, joy, and natural splendour, dedicated not to a god, but to the land.

'The ever-daring voices of Luminescence Chamber Singers join forces with two rising stars: Hilary Geddes, 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellow and lead guitarist of Triple J favourites The Buoys, and category-defying cellist Freya Schack-Arnott. Red Dirt Hymns unfolds to the evocative imagery of Sammy Hawker, whose art is created within the fabric of country itself: saltwater, limestone and eucalypt.

'From Ellen van Neerven’s dark clouds to John Kinsella’s abundant gardens, Red Dirt Hymns does what a hymnal is meant to do: it draws us closer – to each other, and to the light and shade of our wide brown land.'

Source: Canberra International Music Festival.

'Erik Jensen is an award-winning journalist, biographer and screenwriter. These poems announce a new phase in his work. They are startling in their simplicity and their honesty – reminiscent of Mary Oliver, Emily Dickinson and Seamus Heaney. The poems chart the first three years of Jensen’s relationship with his partner, a non-binary composer and musician. They are love poems, written against the complexity of understanding another person. Together they form a fragmentary memoir of hope, disagreement and love.' (Publication summary)

 (Introduction)

'Helen Garner on life, anger and judgement. 

'Ella, eight and African-American, lives in a tiny flat in New Orleans. Her favourite person to visit is Delores, in her sixties and greying, to hear stories about Delores and her old friend Izzy. Carter is Izzy's ten-year old grandchild, living in Newmarket, Mississippi, unaware that his life will soon collide with Ella and Delores in a heartbreaking and inspirational way. Adapted from Maxine Beneba Clarke's acclaimed short story of the same name.'

Source: Screen Australia funding approvals.

'When 19-year-old wunderkind journalist Erik Jensen (now editor of The Saturday Paper) was invited by bad-boy Australian painter Adam Cullen to write his biography, Jensen (Toby Wallace, Romper Stomper) jumped at the chance. Despite a turbulent relationship, the two formed a unique bond that lasted until Cullen’s death in 2012 aged just 46.'

Source: Melbourne International Film Festival, 2018.

'Kate says she doesn’t know what to say about writing. When people ask, she tells them to prepare for a life of failure.

'Award-winning writer Erik Jensen plunges the reader into the world of acclaimed novelist, poet and pioneering feminist Kate Jennings. Weaving in his interviews with Jennings in New York, he shows how poetry, politics and family were transmuted into her first novel, Snake – a work of art that depicts rural Australia in a funny, cutting and unforgettable way. This is a biography of a book and the life that made it.' (Publication summary)

'An unflinching portrait of talent and addiction.

'In 2008 the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography.

'What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed.

'Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australia's most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize-winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six. The story is by turns tender and horrifying: a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement.' (Publication summary)

Sean Nicholls and Erik Jensen report on an ongoing disagreement involving Professor Wendy Bacon, students of the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Sydney Writers' Festival. The students were deterred from distributing their independent literary supplement at the 2009 festival following threats of arrest and litter infringement notices. (In 2008, festival organisers felt that the students' newspaper, Festival News, had disparaged the festival and its supporters.)