Cirrus@Austlit

'Two extraordinary writers, one difficult mother and a vanished literary world.

'Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower met in person for the first time in London in 1972, six years after they began a correspondence that would span four decades. They exchanged letters, cards and telegrams and made occasional phone calls between Harrower’s home in Sydney and Hazzard’s apartments in New York, Naples and Capri. The two women wrote to each other of their daily lives, of impediments to writing, their reading, politics, and in Hazzard’s case, her travels. And they wrote about Hazzard’s mother, for whose care Harrower took increasing – and increasingly reluctant – responsibility from the early 1970s (precisely the period when she herself virtually stopped writing).

'Edited by Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s official biographer, and Susan Wyndham, who interviewed both Hazzard and Harrower, this is an extraordinary account of two literary luminaries, their complex relationship, and their times.'  (Publication summary)

'The Miles Franklin-winning author’s latest novel, about a couple’s choice to renovate a church into a home, is a morally nuanced and wise work'

'Blending forensic research, fiction, life writing and criticism, Funder upends the legacy of literary triumph to reveal the woman behind it' 

'Set among a community of Finnish fishers in a little-known part of the country, Brugman’s debut is a sensuous blend of social history and imaginative fiction'

'The cover of All Our Shimmering Skies is crammed with surprises. Look closely among the Australian wildflowers and you’ll find black hearts, butterflies, lightning bolts, a shovel, a crocodile, a dingo, a fruit bat, a Japanese fighter plane, and a red rising sun.' (Introduction)

(Introduction)

'Helen Garner’s diaries reveal a writer full of complexity'

'A more domesticated sister to the wild, zeitgeist-capturing The Natural Way of Things, The Weekend distils the qualities that built Wood an admiring readership.' (Introduction)

'The story of the Sydney Opera House is usually told as the heroic tragedy of its Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, who won the design competition for his breathtaking cluster of white sails but resigned before its completion over conflict about practicalities, costs, and government interference. In her exquisite novel Shell, Kristina Olsson comes at the drama obliquely, from the perspective of Sydney’s working people.' (Introduction)

'When I was still doing my job, I noticed I had begun to explain myself. ‘I’m literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald … I run our coverage of books: commission book reviews, interview authors, report on the publishing industry.’ My title didn’t always draw blank looks from people I met outside the book world, but I was unconsciously taking pre-emptive action to avoid embarrassment. Strangers frequently told me they were keen readers of the Saturday books pages and envied my job, which they imagined as being paid to read books. I still played an important and beloved role in our culture, but I could also see that I was endangered, like newspapers themselves. As my colleagues increasingly had ‘digital’ and ‘social media’, ‘engagement’ and ‘audience’ in their job descriptions, literary editor—the title and the role—had begun to sound anachronistic.' (Introduction)

'Georgia Blain’s fiction has always observed the effects of disruption on the domestic lives of her urban middle-class characters. Her novels and short stories often have drawn on her experiences. But, as a writer of cool restraint, she was aware that tragedy and coincidence were piling up in her life with a clumsy lack of credibility.

Towards the end of The Museum of Words, she summarises the “plot line” of her memoir as if it were a novel being assessed by her editor:

The central character has just put her mother in a home with Alzheimer’s, her mentor and best friend has terminal brain cancer, she has written a book about terminal brain cancer, and now she has it too … Maybe a little too much?' (Introduction)