On one point Erik Jensen is emphatic when discussing his book Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen: ‘This book is not about art. It’s a character study.’ Adam Cullen was a Sydney artist who flamed out in his forties on alcohol and drugs. He won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of David Wenham but was also notorious for his headline bad-boy behaviour. Because I live in New York, I had never heard of Cullen. Not…

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We interview Julia Gillard about her autobiography, My Story. You can watch the interview in the below video.

We have limited signed copies of My Story available from all five of our shops but hurry! Our stock is limited.

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Our crime specialist Fiona Hardy talks with Nadia Dalbuono about her writing process, Italy and her debut crime novel.

You’ve spent the past fifteen years travelling the world as a documentarian for various companies in the UK. Were you scribbling story ideas in your downtime while on location, or has writing fiction been a recent creative pursuit for you?

I wasn’t exactly scribbling ideas but I did get some inspiration from my travels. I have always wanted to write but…

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Bronte Coates talks with journalist and television presenter Geraldine Doogue about her new book featuring conversations with Australian women in power.

In The Climb, you explore how women are represented at the top levels of power in Australia. What prompted you to approach this topic?

I was very angry around the time of Julia Gillard’s demise at some of the references to her – especially from people like Alan Jones. When he attributed her father’s death to shame at…

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The Night Guest is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Fiona McFarlane five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

The Striped World by Emma Jones; The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper; Futility by William Gerhardie.

What’s the strangest piece of advice you’ve ever been given as a writer? (And did it work?)

…

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The Tribe is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Michael Mohammed Ahmad five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

The Autobiography Of Malcolm X by Malcolm X; The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran; Carpentaria by Alexis Wright.

What’s the strangest piece of advice you’ve ever been given as a writer? (And did it…

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An Elegant Young Man is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask author Luke Carman five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

My bookstore would stock only three books: The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, The Tribe by Mohammed Ahmad, and my own. I don’t care how quickly we’d go out of business…

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Foreign Soil is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Maxine Beneba Clarke five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

My own bookstore would be a catastrophic, commercial disaster. It’d be full of books most people have never heard of, but that I thought were the best books on earth. I’d probably do…

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Only the Animals is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Ceridwen Dovey five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

The three titles permanently stocked in my own bookshop would be Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, The Tree of Man by Patrick White and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood.

What’s the strangest…

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After Darkness is one of the six books included on our inaugural Readings New Australian Writing Award shortlist. Here we ask Christine Piper five quick questions.

If you were opening your own bookshop, what are three titles that would always be kept on your shelves?

Pastoralia by George Saunders, because Saunders is a genius who writes like no one else. His dystopian, quasi-science fiction stories are funny, weird, heartbreaking and impossible to explain. ‘You just have to read it…

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It’s a really interesting thing, isn’t it? To write a book and feel so different about it all the time, and not know some of the answers to the questions,’ 23-year-old debut author Ellen van Neerven confides early in our conversation. She is shy but candid over the phone, often surprising me by asking to hear my own thoughts in return, which makes it as much a pleasure to speak to van Neerven about her breathtakingly good work of fiction…

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Chris Gordon interviews Simon Rickard about his gorgeous new gardening book.

Simon, firstly a huge congratulations from one novice gardener to you, an experienced gardener for your beautiful and accessible book on veggies. Have growing veggies always been a passion for you? Why?

One of my earliest memories is of my father coming home from work and carrying me around his veggie garden, giving me corn silks to smell. I remember the feeling of warmth and wonder. Dad’s mother, who…

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The best kind of storytellers are the ones so adept at their craft that they can hypnotise even those readers bitterly opposed to the subject matter. So it is with Miriam Sved, whose debut novel, Game Day, addresses the complex, often insidious and interweaving relationships formed between the members of an Australian Football League club.

The book is being sold as the journey taken by two young rookies, Mick ‘Mickey’ Reece and Jake Dooley, as they endure the gruelling…

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Belle Place interviews Sophie Cunningham about her new work of non-fiction.

This year marks 40 years since Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin on Christmas Eve – what is your motivation for wanting to write this book now?

I have always been fascinated by Cyclone Tracy – it had a big impact on me as a child. But, as I write in the book, my biggest motivation was the fact that the human race is transforming the land, the seas and the…

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Chris Gordon talks with Omar Musa about his revelatory and incendiary debut novel.

Your parents are both writers – your mum is a journalist and your dad is poet – and now you’ve made words your tools as well. What is your earliest memory of the power of language?

Always hard to say. Was it when I went to plays with my mum (she was a theatre reviewer) as a kid and was amazed at how a person could hold…

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Lisa Dempster talks with Ianto Ware about his new book, part love letter to cycling and part history of the Tour de France.

What inspired you to write about the Tour de France?

I was a chronic insomniac when I was a student, which is how I got into the Tour. I used to stay up late at night writing and watching cycling and the two sort of merged.

Then, after I finished my PhD, I started working as a…

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Bronte Coates talks with journalist Mary Delahunty about her inside account of Julia Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Gravity draws from your time following former Prime Minister Julia Gillard through the last year of her term. When did you realise this experience would become a book?

When I bumped into the PM on Mugga Way in Canberra. Where else in the world can you just stroll along a bush boulevard in the nation’s capital and nearly trip over a Prime…

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Eli Glasman admits he felt ‘a little scared’ about how Melbourne’s Orthodox Jewish community would respond to his first novel, The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew, given it is narrated by a 17-year-old Orthodox rabbi’s son trying to reconcile his sexuality with his faith.

Yossi is, as his friend Menachem says, ‘proper religious’. He begins his day with a ritual hand-washing, always wears a tzitzit (a traditional woollen undergarment) and feels ‘chuffed’ when he’s the first…

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Jason Austin talks with Anna George about her new novel,

What Came Before begins with David’s confession that he’s killed his wife Elle. As the story progresses, we learn not only what came before that event, but what came before the couple met and how their once passionate relationship fell apart. David, in particular is a very charming, yet very troubled character. Was it hard getting into the mind a person capable of committing domestic violence and how did you…

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Belle Place talks with Michaela McGuire about her new work of true crime.

Your book hinges on the case of Anthony Dunning, the 40-year-old man who was pinned to the floor of Crown casino by security staff and who later died. Was it important to your book to establish a sense of who Dunning was?

It was important for me to establish a sense of who everyone involved was – Anthony Dunning; his two best friends who were with him…

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Justin Heazlewood – AKA The Bedroom Philosopher – talks about his rogue self-help book.

In Funemployed, you look at the actualities of being a working artist in Australia. Can you tell about your motivation to write this book, and how the process unfolded?

I was down and out! I was thousands of dollars in debt from an overly ambitious Melbourne Comedy Festival campaign. I was bitter and burnt out and hadn’t been enjoying live performance for a couple of…

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The photo on the cover of The Feel-Good Hit of the Year is of a boy who looks like he’s running away from something. It was taken at Labassa, the National Trust-listed nineteenth-century mansion in Caulfield where the author, Liam Pieper, lived as a child.

‘Dad took the photo,’ Pieper says. ‘I can’t remember it, but I assume we were playing Robin Hood, ’cause that was my Robin Hood outfit.’ He points out a spot to the left of the…

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Bronte Coates talks with Andrew Solomon about unorthodox families, including his own.

Far from the Tree is frequently described as a ‘life-changing’ book, and I’d absolutely agree with this statement; after reading the book I’ve viewed my own relationship with my family differently. Do you feel a sense of responsibility for such a reaction from readers?

I’m of course honoured by the designation of it as a life-changing book, and have been especially moved by letters I’ve received that emphasize…

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We live in an era infatuated with memory and perspective. In looking back, we interrogate our individual and collective pasts in an attempt, perhaps, to check our own authenticity, to keep ourselves honest. But the truth of the past, if such a thing exists, is as changeable as our needs.

This notion is at the centre of Emily Bitto’s engaging debut novel, The Strays. The story is centred around a group of avant-garde artists in Melbourne in the 1930s…

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Bronte Coates talks with Maxine Beneba Clarke about her debut collection of short stories.

Foreign Soil portrays characters positioned on the fringe of society, often oppressed or downtrodden – an asylum seeker at Villawood, a pregnant young woman in rural Jamaica. What appeals to you about writing these kinds of protagonists?

All of the issues explored in Foreign Soil are part of my experience in some way. That said, I’m not telling my own stories, but my characters’ stories, grounded…

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Bronte Coates talks with Angela Meyer about her new collection of micro fiction.

Why flash fiction? (And can you describe to new readers what it is?)

The terms flash fiction, and micro fiction, are relatively new ways to categorise an old form: the very short story. Some of my favourite writers in this form are Franz Kafka and Janet Frame, and I’ve been undeniably inspired by contemporary Australian writers such as Rodney Hall, Josephine Rowe, Tom Cho, Paddy O’Reilly, Christopher…

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Bronte Coates talks with Ceridwen Dovey about her new collection of short stories.

Only the Animals has a distinct set-up: told from the perspective of ten different animals, each story depicts how they lived and died during human conflicts, and throughout, pays homage to a particular real-life author. Where did this unusual premise come from?

The task I set myself for this book was to see if I could take these over-determined, already obsessively ‘gone over’ experiences of horror, pain…

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This week we interview three small presses about why they started their project, and what exciting projects they have in the works. Here, Kabita Dhara tells us about Brass Monkey Books.

What were your reasons for establishing Brass Monkey Books?

I had long been a bit frustrated that so many of the Indian books written in English that we get in the West either explore the migration story or are historical. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but…

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This week we interview three small presses about why they started their project, and what exciting projects they have in the works. Here, Donna Ward tells us about Inkerman & Blunt.

And suddenly you know: It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings. — Meister Eckhart

What were your reasons for establishing Inkerman & Blunt?

I have a passion for creating beautiful books of exceptional ideas written exquisitely. I love reading those kinds of books…

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This week we interview three small presses about why they started their project, and what exciting projects they have in the works. Here, Johannes Jakob tells us about Hologram.

What were your reasons for establishing Hologram?

Hologram is a new project by Express Media, publishing two novellas by writers under 30. We figured novellas were kind of an underrated format – they have the same laser focus as a short story, sharp to one particular day or just a…

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John A. Scott’s long-awaited novel, N, is set in a re-imagined, though frighteningly familiar, Australia. Moving between the stories of artists, soldiers, public servants and visionaries, and told in a breadth of narrative styles, N is both a love story and political thriller. Here, Scott talks with David Brooks about writing this work of epic scope and masterful intricacies.

It is wartime – 1942 – and Australia is occupied by the Japanese. Sydney has been devastated. Melbourne is the…

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Our Events Manager Chris Gordon interviews Betty Churcher about Australian Notebooks.

Congratulations on your second book.

I’m so glad you enjoyed my meander through the Australian Galleries.

Your tour of these galleries is both enlightening and heart-warming; I enjoyed being in the arms of what I felt was an art-lover, artist and historian all at once. How would you describe your position in relation to these books?

You were in the arms of an art-lover every step of the…

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Our Readings Monthly editor Belle Place interviews Irish writer Mark Mulholland about his debut novel, A Mad and Wonderful Thing, the story of an IRA sniper in the 1990s .

Your novel takes place in Dundalk, Ireland, in the 1990s. You’re from Dundalk, which explains your rich portrayal of the setting, but what drew you to explore this particular historical territory in a novel, and how much personal experience of The Troubles did you have to draw on?

I…

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Suzanne McCourt’s debut novel is set in Burley Point, a quiet fishing town on Australia’s wild southern coast. Here, McCourt talks with Romy Ash about writing her young protagonist, Sylvie, and constructing the troubled narrative of a small town and a missing child.

The Lost Child is a quiet epic, spanning a decade of immense change in the lives of its characters and the small rural town of Burley Point where the novel is set. This is a book that…

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Mandy Sayer’s third memoir vividly details her marriage to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, and their unconventional life lived across the United States and in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Here, Sayer talks with Krissy Kneen about committing her tumultuous marriage to the page.

When reading a review of a memoir we often come across a repeated set of related words. ‘Brave’ is the first one that springs to mind, along with ‘courageous’, ‘fearless’, ‘bold’. But what is so brave about…

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Gabrielle Carey talks to Chris Somerville about the reclusive novelist Randolph Stow, the secrets families keep and her new memoir,

‘One night I dreamt I saw Randolph Stow. He was sitting in a cave, wearing a long robe, his chest bare, ascetic, like one of the desert fathers. There was something magisterial about his aspect, and compelling, magnetic.
I woke with a shock. This is too much, I thought. This is taking literary obsession too far. Clearly, his grip on…

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Belle Place interviews John Safran about his new true-crime book,

For many readers, Mississippi typifies the Deep South and brings to mind typical associations – cotton fields, slavery, the blues. Tell us about the Mississippi that you encountered, and the everyday lives of the people that live there?

I’ve heard the expression: ‘The Jews are like everyone else, only more so.’ Mississippians are like this too. Like in my hometown, in Jewish Melbourne, everyone doesn’t know that they’re slightly mad…

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Fiona McFarlane talks to Tony Birch about foreboding presences, dignity in ageing and the shifting motif of the tiger in her spellbinding debut novel,

In the first page of this thought-provoking and tender novel, a smelly, noisy and threatening tiger disrupts the sleep of Ruth, an elderly widow at the centre of the story. The large cat turns up in her lounge room in the dead of night: an unusual event in any circumstances, and quite bizarre considering Ruth lives…

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Alexis Wright won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007 for her surreal and sweeping

‘I have seen swans all my life. I have watched them in many different countries myself. Some of them have big wings like the Trumpeter Swan of North America, and when the dust smudges the fresh breath of these guardian angels, they navigate through the never-ending dust storms by correcting their bearings and flying higher in the sky, from where they glide like Whistling Swans…

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Vanessa Russell’s

I was so obnoxious,’ laughs Vanessa Russell, with a mix of ruefulness and affection in her voice. She’s speaking of her own days as an 18-year-old true believer in a small Christadelphian community, which she remained involved with until her twenties. ‘I was super holy Sister Vanessa.’

We’re talking via Skype and it’s hard to imagine any trace of self-righteousness surrounding Russell. She seems temperamentally self-deprecating and humble, if disarmingly sincere, displaying an unflustered agreeableness through technical hitches…

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Fiona Wood won readers over with her debut novel,

Fiona Wood’s much-loved debut, Six Impossible Things, was a funny and forensic look at the life of 14-year-old nerd-boy Dan Cereill. The novel worked through his impossible love, his depressed mother, his gay dad and his dying dog. In her sophomore release, Wildlife, Wood opens the tent fly on teenage social and sexual mores at a private school’s outdoor education campus. The year tens at the prestigious Crowthorne Grammar…

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Michael, I loved your book – congratulations on a fine debut. But love’s a loaded word isn’t it in the context of this novel? We hang on to it in our kin and other close relationships - sometimes as a “last thread” – but there can be a whole history of devastations under its veneer. Maybe I should say then: I loved the steadfastness you exhibit in your examination of a sometimes quite gut-wrenching family history. Did you struggle with…

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In

What drew you to explore this side of sporting culture? Did you feel that this was a book that needed to be written?

It was the unfortunate ‘St Kilda Schoolgirl’ saga that caught my (and many others’) attention back in 2010. It was a pretty trashy story, one that involved a teenage girl, footballers, a false allegation of pregnancy, viral emails, photos of naked players and a salivating media circus. (One tabloid journalist even helped the teenager at the…

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Hannah Kent talks to Margo Lanagan about researching nineteenth-century Iceland, her mentorship with Geraldine Brooks and her astonishing debut novel,

The saga of Burial Rites began when, at 17, Hannah Kent spent a year in Iceland as an exchange student. For the first few months, ‘I didn’t speak the language, I was homesick, I was horribly conscious of the fact that I “did not belong” while simultaneously being very conspicuous, and the winter darkness compounded all of that discontent. I…

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Anna Goldsworthy talks to Emily Maguire about life as a first-time mother, the awes and anxieties of early love, and memoir without a capital M.

When pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy canvassed the idea of writing a book about first-time motherhood, she found most of the people she spoke to ‘weren’t exactly keen … There’s an anxiety that writing about motherhood is going to be boasting about your kid or sentimental or banal.’

‘I do feel annoyed at the way…

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Michelle Dicinoski talks to Benjamin Law about revolution and love, our hidden queer histories and her debut memoir

Cast your mind back to the last decade, and you might be forgiven for thinking same-sex marriage was going to be legalised in Australia at any moment. For the first time in history, the majority of polled Australians supported the idea. Around the world, countries made history by passing it into law. First came the Netherlands in 2001, then Belgium, Spain, South…

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In 2011, Lesley Jørgensen won the CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for her debut,

‘In Christian text, the focus on sexuality is battening it down. It’s really only acceptable in relation to procreation. But guidance set out by the Koran and Sharia law assumes sexual relations are not only for pleasure, but fundamental to the well-rounded human being.’ So says Lesley Jørgensen, her voice down the phone line unhurried and her words carefully chosen – much as you’d expect from a…

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Jo Case interviews Australian writer Anna Funder, of Stasiland fame, about her first foray into fiction, All That I Am.

The idea of choosing not to witness – and the moral responsibilities that carries – is central to the book. There are characters who don’t see things they don’t want to know about those closest to them. And on a national level, Britain seems to wilfully choose not to know what is happening under Hitler’s regime in Berlin, with…

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[[ham]] Rosalie Ham made her name with her much-loved debut,

In the 25 years that Rosalie Ham has lived in Brunswick, she’s watched her corner of the suburb change in fundamental ways. ‘When we came here, there was no one in the park,’ she says. ‘There was no one there, just a bunch of teenagers who would smoke and drink and root each other, and some older people passed out in the toilets. Now you have to queue for the…

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Jo Case interviews Adelaide author Vikki Wakefield about her edgy, darkly funny YA debut novel,

All I Ever Wanted

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Your teenage heroine, Mim, is the one straight girl in a notorious crime family, longing to escape her surrounds and fascinated by the brother and sister from the fringes of her dodgy suburb, “glossy with the sheen of parental love”. It’s such an inventive premise – a bit like

Originally the novel was meant to be a story about the…

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