Cirrus@Austlit

'Australia spent 2021 trying to limit the spread of Covid-19, before finally admitting defeat in the face of the Delta variant and letting it run through the community. Most Australians were in lockdown for many weeks; Melbourne, the most affected city, was subject to 262 days of restricted movement over 2020 and 2021. The headlines, meanwhile, were dominated by a slow roll-out of Covid vaccines. One anthology was a direct response to the Covid experience, Lockdown Poetry: The Covid Long Haul, edited by Rose Lucas. “In these poems,” writes reviewer Belinda Calderone, “I was struck by the beautiful detail, the naming of specific flora and fauna, as though our shrunken worlds encouraged us to look at things more closely”. Calderone observes that “the pandemic threw everything we knew into flux, forcing us to look at our lives anew, and sometimes to shed parts of ourselves we had long held on to…”, adding that “[i]n times of collective suffering throughout human history, poets are the ones who are able to name what seems unnameable” (Rochford Street Review, 8 April, see Anthologies). As a coda to the release of How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 (the third volume of her diaries — see below), Helen Garner separately published her “Lockdown Diaries” in The Monthly:

As the world closes in on itself, the simplest acts grow mythic. A woman reports shifting a tree in her garden that was not thriving: “I used a mattock. I lifted it above my head. The dirt fell all over me.” A nurse in ICU sets up a laptop for a woman to hear her grandchildren singing to her while she dies. An Olympic diver on the high platform turns her back on the abyss, places her palms beside her feet, and unfolds with terrifying slowness into a perfect, motionless handstand. (The Monthly October, see Non-Fiction)' (Introduction)

'Australian novelist David Ireland, winner of three Miles Franklin awards in the 1970s, and recipient of the Order of Australia in 1981, has died at the age of 94.' 

'In a publishing feat, the anthology Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 appeared in the December of the very year it was responding to. Editor Sophie Cunningham brought together 25 essays originally published on the Guardian Australia website. She writes in her introduction:

as the new year dawned — violent, smoky — there were bushfires to contend with, then air quality so dangerous my … loved ones were trapped in their house. Soon enough there were hailstorms smashing into their workplaces. More fires, floods, then the plague. On it went. We understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change. We understood that deforestation led to an increased likelihood of pandemics, but frankly, people can’t look every which way all at once and anyway it seemed that the genie was out of the bottle, the cat was out of the bag, the tipping point had tipped and now we were in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.'

(Introduction)

'A defining moment in Australian literature in 2016 involved two unlikely protagonists — an American novelist and a Sudanese-Australian engineer. It happened at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September when journalist and author Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address defending the right of writers to wear “different hats”, while wearing a Mexican sombrero, referencing a controversy at an American college over cultural appropriation. Fiction, Shriver said, will always involve writing about other cultures and identities, and she hit out at the way she felt identity politics made writers reluctant to do this. A number of audience members walked out of the talk and several of these wrote opinion pieces, including 25-year-old Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer as well as a debut memoirist in 2016. Abdel-Magied labelled Shiver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction” (Guardian 10 September 2016, emphasis original). The Guardian published her response and then, three days later, Shriver’s original speech (13 September 2016).'  (Introduction)

'This year’s bibliography includes a large number of items carried over from the past year (entries are marked as 2012 publications in each case) and, in the case of Canberra poet Timoshenko Aslanides, listings go back even further. Many of his works had been missed because they were not covered by our primary review sources. The Australian compilers hope to cast a wider net in future years by citing more newspaper reviews. Meanwhile, for compilers and readers alike, the “silver lining” in this omission provides the opportunity for a short but genuinely enthusiastic review of a long career.' (Authors introduction)

Australian Popular Fictions is the umbrella term for a number of ongoing, related projects, led by Dr Kim Wilkins, Professor Van Ikin, and Dr Toni Johnson-Woods, that explore popular fiction and fiction genres.

It aimed to collect and expand the available information and scholarship relating to all forms of popular fiction including crime, fantasy, horror, pulp, graphic novels and comics, and lesbian- and gay-themed popular works and their authors. The project supports research into the long, prolific and profitable industry of mass market genre fiction publishing.