Cirrus@Austlit

'In this companion to the award-winning, My Gallipoli, many voices will recall the day the Great War ended and the monthsthat followed before peace rang out around the world.

'On 11 November 1918, after four years of fighting, the Allied powers signed an agreement with Germany to end the Great War and to begin peace negotiations. The armistice, as it was known, took effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. But it would take more than seven months before peace would finally be declared at Versailles on 28 June 1919. The Great War was over. But the world as it had been known was changed forever.

'In this book, many voices recall the day the war ended,and the months that followed before peace rang out around the world. Armistice will bring these stories to life and is published to commemorate the 100th anniversary since the fighting stopped.' (Publication Summary)

'Haifa, Israel, May 2001, and a heavily pregnant woman, a doctor, is at the site of a bomb blast, picking her way carefully through the dead, perhaps looking for her husband who is not answering his phone. Her attention is suddenly caught by a coloured gemstone lying amid the rubble; ‘the last thing she sees before she passes out is a mangled body lying in a heap over in one corner. Red lipstick still perfectly frames the dead woman’s lips’.' (Introduction)

We are giving South Australian schoolchildren the chance to become writers.

To mark The Advertiser Sunday Mail Children’s Literacy Month, we have started a progressive children’s novel, The Boy With Silver Eyes.

Every day for the next month, award-winning children’s author Ruth Starke will work with children from schools across the state as they take up the story, weaving a tale of suspense and adventure that, when it’s done, we will publish as an e-book. (The Advertiser 27 Feb, 2015)

'From the shores of Anzac Cove to the heights of Chunuk Bair, from Cape Helles to Gurkha Bluff, the Gallipoli Peninsula was the place where thousands of men from sixteen nations fought, suffered, endured or died during the eight months of occupation in 1915. For each of them, their families and their nurses, Gallipoli meant something different. Their voices emerge from the landscape and across the decades with stories of courage, valour, despair and loss. Winner of the 2015 NSW Premier's Young People's History Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 Asher Literary Award and the 2016 Children's Book Council of Australia Crichton Award A 2016 Children's Book Council of Australia Notable Book' (Publication summary 2016 edition)

'Hannah Kent has enjoyed enormous international success with her first novel, Burial Rites, a reimagining of the life and death of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland for murder. Published in Australia in May 2013, the book has also been published in the UK and in the USA, and in over twenty other countries. Jennifer Lawrence will play Agnes in the forthcoming movie to be directed by Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games.

Hannah was born in Adelaide in 1985 and grew up in the Adelaide Hills where her family still lives. Hannah completed her BCW (Hons) in 2008 at Flinders University, where she is currently completing her PhD. Burial Rites is the creative component of that doctoral thesis and Ruth Starke, who interviews Hannah below, is her principal supervisor. ' (Publication abstract)

'My postgraduate student frowned. ‘The Gathering? Isn’t that the one where someone sets a dog on fire?’ Spoiler alert: indeed it is. It is the book’s most memorable scene; it is certainly the most horrific. My postgrad had read Isobelle Carmody’s 1993 novel in high school and that was the first memory of it which surfaced. The scene shocked readers and alienated many: ‘I re-read the novel recently but I skipped that chapter’ wrote one online reviewer.' (Introduction)