Cirrus@Austlit

'From poet and bestselling novelist Peter Goldsworthy, this darkly funny, bittersweet memoir offers lessons in how to live life in the shadow of an incurable illness.

''My first stray thought- cancer is a gift. I'm lucky to have it. What priceless material for a doctor-writer.'

'What lessons might cancer teach him before it finishes him off? Peter Goldsworthy asks, obliquely.

'A GP of forty years' practice, as well as one of Australia's most awarded and celebrated writers, Goldsworthy ('Doctor Pete' to his patients) brings his characteristic black humour and storytelling power to the tale of his own cancer journey.

'Accidentally diagnosed after a scan of his dicky knee, he was thrown into a world that he knew only too well from the other side- a world that soon shrank to hospital visits, sleepless and hyped-up nights on dexamethasone and life-saving chemotherapy.

'Never one to waste a story, Peter intersperses his own experience with odd and astonishing case stories of patients and literary friends who have trodden the same path- both cautionary tales and exemplary tales, sometimes laugh-out-loud, sometimes deeply moving, that intersect with, or refract, his own travels through denial, acceptance, treatment and survival.

'Darkly funny, and filled with growing love and wonder, The Cancer Finishing School offers lessons in how to live life in the shadow of an incurable illness.' (Publication summary)

'Restricted to phone consultations due to the Covid lockdown and my chemo-blasted immune system, I rely increasingly on the selfies of body parts that patients text me to help diagnosis. My iPhone library of lumps, bruises, wounds, rashes, boils, red eyes, and even vaginal discharges, grows rapidly, a luminous pathology museum that often reminds me of Dr Azov in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), who examines his future wife through a hole in a sheet and, over the course of many house calls, assembles a jigsaw picture of the complete woman with whom he will slowly fall in love.'  (Introduction)

'Doctor and writer Peter Goldsworthy on how we can take some of the lessons of lockdown back into normal life.'

'In the remarks that preface his 2003 Nobel Lecture, entitled ‘He and His Man’ (worth watching on YouTube for the dry comedy of the delivery alone), J. M. Coetzee speaks of reading The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe when he was ‘eight or nine’. Presumably this was an abridged children’s version of the kind many of us read at that age. He would not have been alone when he fell in love with this ‘desert island that became a kingdom’, or when Crusoe became ‘a figure in my imagination’. Less predictable, perhaps, was his bewilderment at the claim in his Children’s Encyclopaedia that the author of the book was someone called Daniel Defoe. ‘This made no sense,’ he continues, ‘because it said on the first page of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe told the story himself.’(Introduction)'

'Find a comfortable chair and a glass of single malt whisky to savour the life and poetry of Les Murray.'

'Peter Goldsworthy's new novel features a blind detective determined to deliver justice to the man who shot him, even though his failed assassin has broken out of jail and is equally determined to finish the job. Cleverly structured around the five senses, and with the action confined to one week, it’s pacey and taut, with the cat-and-mouse tension leavened by lighter interludes.

'Goldsworthy is interested in all that his protagonist cannot see, as he is forced to meet evil, acting on a trust in his senses, and the ineluctable mystery that is memory.'  (Publication summary)

'Lost & Found’s mission is to discover lost or forgotten works and present them in unique found spaces. This specially commissioned world premiere invites you into an old timber mill to discover a very different side to one of Australia’s iconic figures.

'Composer Luke Styles and librettist Peter Goldsworthy weave together the common myth with lesser known extraordinary facts about the politics, loves and quirks of Australia’s legendary bushranger. Cross dressing, pig stealing, bee keeping, opium smoking, devout republican supporting, armour wearing loyal family men — that’s just part of the story of the notorious Kelly gang.

'Superstar Australian baritone Samuel Dundas takes on the title role in a new-found space on the outskirts of Perth that provides the perfect setting, backdrop and link to Australia's frontier past.'

Source: Perth Festival.

'A seven-hundred-page Collected Poems? The cover photograph of the Big Bloke himself is an embodiment of what’s inside in all its sprawling abundance. As is his surname, which can’t help but invoke our country’s big river, whether in full flood, or slow trickle, or slow spreading billabongs.'  (Introduction)

'Steve Brock began writing in the shadow of the New York school, but in ‘dreaming with Ted Berrigan’ – ‘I can’t remember if he said anything’ – might be saying goodbye to those earlier cool dudes and already anticipating the more variable temperature of South American poetry. He has spent a lot of time in Chile especially, and has translated extensively from the Spanish. Of course, Latin American models are a pretty broad canvas. Just to take the temperature of Chilean poetry – Nicanor Parra is drop-dead cool, Neruda is hot. What seems to be emerging on Steve’s recent work is a relaxed, often laconic style which is heading back home across the Pacific to be its own influence. It is deceptively unrhetorical, but it contains multitudes.' (Introduction)

'Series Two of the South Australian States of Poetry anthology is edited by Peter Goldsworthy and features poems by Steve Brock, Cath Kenneally, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas, Jan Owen, and Dominic Symes.' (Introduction)