Cirrus@Austlit

'Acclaimed Waanyi writer Alexis Wright has made Australian literary history by being the first author to win the Stella Prize twice. This time, it’s for Praiseworthy, her fourth novel – her first in more than a decade.'

'For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.' (Introduction)

(Introduction)

'Acclaimed poet Sarah Holland-Batt has won the 2023 Stella Prize for her powerful and elegiac collection of poetry, The Jaguar.'

'Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World is an ambitious, strange and marvellous novel.'

 (Introduction)

'I first encountered Amanda Lohrey’s work as a PhD student, attempting to write a survey of politicians in Australian fiction. This project was abandoned when I realised that I did not have the stamina to read and write about so many woeful novels (especially those written by politicians themselves).' (Introduction)

'The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.' (Introduction)

'Frank Moorhouse, who died in Sydney on Sunday, made a significant and multi-faceted contribution to Australia’s literary life.'  (Introduction)

'A guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction, and a meditation on what her writing has to say about contemporary life and how we live it.

'Amanda Lohrey is a fearless and idiosyncratic writer whose award-winning career spans four decades. Her work is experimental, political, intimate and compelling. Lohrey provides an illuminating series of readings of key preoccupations across Lohrey's body of work. From the relationship of the personal to the political, masculinity and free will, human and non-human worlds and how reading shapes us, Lohrey traces a remarkable career across the contemporary literary landscape, and provides readers with an understanding of Lohrey's bold and singular style.'  (Publication summary)

'For the first time in the nine-year history of the Stella Count, and perhaps in the entire history of Australian book reviewing, gender equality has become the norm in Australia’s books pages. Our new research for the Count reveals 55% of books reviewed in Australian publications in 2020 were by women.' (Introduction)

'This chapter surveys the long history of discussions around gender and book reviewing in Australia. It provides an overview of some common attitudes to books by women in Australian reviews since the nineteenth century as well as some key flashpoints in the history of Australian women’s writing in which the reviews played a part. We identify significant continuities in how women’s writing is described in the pages of book reviews, from the nineteenth century until recently: women are presumed to be writing from ‘life,’ not art; they are infantilised and/or sexualised and conflated with their protagonists; and the praise they receive is circumscribed by gendered assumptions about genre and genius. We also discuss several controversies about gender and book reviewing – in the mid-1980s and the 2010s – to think about the impact that gendered reviewing practices continue to have on the careers and aspirations of women writers.' 

Source: Abstract.

'Across her seven novels, Amanda Lohrey has been interested in the role that reading plays in our lives. In her work, reading is always situated: we know where her characters read, how it shapes and is shaped by their circumstances. We follow 1950s Hobart communists from their reading groups to the docks to the courtroom. In a near-future Australia, characters read to find some guidance about how to act meaningfully in the face of political crisis. A woman’s reading of Jane Eyre in a dark Leichhardt terrace scaffolds her life and decisions. Another character reads Madame Bovary on a canal boat, freezing, miserable and surrounded by rowdy teenagers, and finds herself oddly reflected. A city man moves to the bush and reads travel writing about another land stolen, fought over and decimated.' (Introduction)