Story of my book

Anna George on sleep debt in The Lone Child

by Anna George

Author Anna George reflects on how a lack of sleep informed her second novel, The Lone Child – a gripping, atmospheric story of early motherhood.

We recently interviewed George over on the Readings Podcast. You can listen to our conversation with her here.

I’d never heard of a sleep debt until after I was seriously in the red – having spent months sleeping four or five hours a night. I now know that your sleep debt is the difference…

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Let's hear it for the girl in crime fiction

by Megan Goldin

Crime author Megan Goldin defends the use of the word girl in crime fiction titles.

When I wrote my psychological thriller, The Girl In Kellers Way, I chose the title because it encapsulated the key themes of my story of four women whose fates are connected by a remote forest road where a series of tragedies take place. Little did I realise that by choosing a title with the word girl in it, I was stepping into a minefield…

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Tackling social media in teen books

by Gabrielle Williams

Gabrielle Williams is an an acclaimed author of young adult fiction. Her new novel, My Life as a Hashtag, is a funny, heartfelt read about rage, regret and the pitfalls of life in the digital age.

We recently asked Williams how she approached social media when writing for teenagers. Here is her response.

When I was at school, my friend’s boyfriend broke up with her via toilet paper. I imagine him sitting down one afternoon (hopefully with the lid…

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Heavy feelings, queer friendship and making comics

by Alice Chipkin & Jessica Tavassoli

Alice Chipkin and Jessica Tavassoli (or Tava) share the story behind their debut graphic memoir, Eyes Too Dry, which explores heavy feelings, queer friendship and the therapeutic possibilities of making comics.

Holding this book in its fully formed and thumbable state feels surreal. Mainly because this project started as a way for us to work through and reflect on 2015, a difficult period of time for both of us. In the thick of it we had struggled to find…

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Zoë Morrison on music and language in her debut novel

by Zoë Morrison

We’re delighted to be hosting an event next week with Zoë Morrison – a talented new voice in Australian fiction. Morrison will discuss her debut novel, Music and Freedom, with author Alice Pung. Find more details and booking information here.

In the lead-up to this event, we asked Morrison what role she saw the language of music as playing in her story. Here’s her response.

I started playing the violin when I was three and the piano when…

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The story behind BOLD

by David Hardy

David Hardy is the editor of BOLD: Stories from older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, a new anthology from Melbourne not-for-profit book publisher, The Rag and Bone Man Press. Here, Hardy tells us about the process of making the book, and why it matters.

BOLD is a collection of stories from more than 60 older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people. They are largely unknown stories outside their circle of family and friends, and all…

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The story of my book

by Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Wood is the author of The Natural Way of Things. Here she tells us the story behind her novel.

The very first glimmer of the story came to me in an ABC Radio National documentary about the Hay Institution for Girls, a brutal prison in rural NSW, where ten teenage girls were drugged and taken from the Parramatta Girls’ Home in the 1960s. At this place, which operated in extreme cruelty until 1974, the girls were forced to…

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Sarah Holland-Batt on how travel energises her poetry

by Sarah Holland-Batt

Poetry collections are most often gatherings of miscellanea, assemblages of thoughts and ideas and arguments curated over a period of years, textual cabinets of curiosities. This makes it difficult to think of the poetry collection as a fully unified animal – straddling, as it does, different times and places, the different selves who wrote the poems, those who were in love and those who had fallen out of it, and so forth. All of which is a roundabout way of…

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Cook your way through Rush Oh!

by Shirley Barrett

We’re thrilled to be hosting a free event with Shirley Barrett (filmmaker and now author) this Friday 4 September. Barrett will be in conversation with critic Rebecca Harkins-Cross. Find out more here.

Here, Barrett shares some recipes and housekeeping tips which are referenced in her debut novel, Rush Oh!.

One of the pleasures of writing domestic fiction in a historical setting is the opportunity it presents to waste hours of precious writing time poring over ancient recipe books…

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Sasha Grishin on the works of ST Gill

by Sasha Grishin

ST Gill & His Audiences is the first major comprehensive book to be devoted to this major Australian artist. Author Sasha Grishin tells us of his own experiences with Gill’s works and life, and why he was inspired to write this book.

The book is published to coincide with an exhibition currently on at State Library Victoria: Australian sketchbook: Colonial life and the art of ST Gill. Once Australia’s most popular artist and now a forgotten name, this first-ever…

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The story of my book

by Rachel Hills

Rachel Hills is the author of The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality. Here she talks about why she felt it was important to write about this idea.

As soon as the idea for The Sex Myth came to me, I knew it was ‘the one’. I’d flirted with other ideas for books before, ranging from the not-particularly-original (a collection of essays pontificating on contemporary feminist issues) to the thank-god-I-never-actually-pitched-that (a series of interviews with inspiring…

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The story of my book: Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

It might these days be fashionable to say it but nevertheless the seeds of all of my books have begun in walking. The trigger for my new novel Archipelago of Souls lies in a pretty arduous but wonderful walk I took around the island of Crete back when I was still at university. My eyes were opened in many ways during those days, not only to the sea-lit slopes and valleys of the classical world of Minoan and Homeric myth…

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Eliza Henry-Jones on horses and grief

by Eliza Henry-Jones

Eliza Henry-Jones is the author of In the Quiet. Here she talks about the role horses and grief play in her novel.

I think many of us have gone through phases of pony obsession – bedrooms filled with the silhouettes of little plastic ponies (My Little Ponies or Barbie’s Pegasus if you were really lucky) and stacks of yellowing school library books with horses on the cover. Who hasn’t been misty eyed at The Saddle Club and begged for…

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Trent Jamieson on vampires and day boys

by Trent Jamieson

I love vampires. I adore the literature and film that has grown up around the myth. The vampire genre is almost as old as mainstream publishing and it constantly reinvigorates itself because vampires, like all good monsters, are something of a blank canvas. Meanings can be projected onto them. They can be monstrous, yet elegant. They can be the night refined or crude and hungry.

However, while the vampires in Day Boy infuse the book, they aren’t what sit at…

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The story of my book

by John Tesarsch

The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffman follows three gifted siblings whose lives are turned upside down when their elderly father is diagnosed with dementia, and shoots himself rather than end up in a nursing home. After his funeral one of his daughters, Eleanor, finds a will buried in his books and papers. He has left his entire estate to a woman she has never heard of before. Is the woman a secret lover, or just a figment of…

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The story behind my book

by Klaus Neumann

I became first interested in the history of Australia’s response to refugees and asylum seekers fourteen years ago. What interested me at the time was that a small group of immigrants who had arrived in Australia in the second half of the 1930s were declared ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War on account of their nationality, and were then interned. They had come to Australia in search of protection, and were locked up during the war because they could…

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Zoë Norton Lodge on storytelling and performance

by Zoë Norton Lodge

Zoë Norton Lodge is the author of Almost Sincerely. Here she tells us about how she came to write her book, and her love of storytelling.

My book is a series of short stories about me, my family and the place I grew up – a suburb in Sydney called Annandale. Taking the maxim ‘write what you know’ to uncomfortable extremes, I have literally just written about people I know and stuff that happened to me. In that sense…

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Rochelle Siemienowicz on turning 20 and reading Praise

by Rochelle Siemienowicz

In 1992 I turned 20 and got married. Raised as a strict Seventh-day Adventist (a boutique form of evangelical Christianity), I believed that the end of the world was near and that sex before marriage was a terrible sin. My boyfriend and I had fallen passionately in love at church, and we knew we had to get married quickly if we wanted to stay ‘good’. So we had our white wedding in the middle of winter during University’s mid-semester break…

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The story behind my book

by Krissy Kneen

Krissy Kneen is the author of The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine. Here she tells us about writing a novel that references a lot of other books.

Originally my publisher pitched the idea to me. He thought I should write an erotic fiction book referencing the classic erotic texts. The idea excited me as soon as I heard it. I had been dabbling reading the classics of erotica but this gave me an excuse to…

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Is it hard to be honest when telling embarrassing stories?

by Joel Meares

Joel Meares is the author of We’re All Going to Die (Especially Me). We asked him whether he found it hard to be honest when telling embarrassing stories. Here’s his response.

One of the first people who read my book was Annabel Crabb, and her response scared the shit out of me.

I’d asked Annabel to take a look at the manuscript and, if she liked it, whether she’d be interested in providing an endorsement. She did, and she…

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The story of my book: Down to the River

by S.J. Finn

26 years ago, a friend told me a detail about their childhood. Simply and without fuss, they described that for a number of years during the winter months they were in charge of lighting the local priest’s fire each morning before school started.

This scenario became a worm in my thoughts. Wriggling its way around my imagination, it multiplied, you could say, until it turned into a can-full, which is perfect if you want to tell a story. All that…

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Alice Pung on writing fiction for young adults

by Alice Pung

We’re loving Alice Pung’s new young adult novel, Laurinda! Here she tells us what she sees as the challenges and freedoms of writing fiction for young adults as opposed to adults.

No other books have moved me or shaped me as much as the books I read as a teenager, when I had time to think about the world and my place in it. Young adulthood is a time when, for the very first time, you have the thoughts…

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The Story of My Book: Vulpes

by Chris Rodgers

Vulpes first came to me while running, when my playlist rolled onto The Futureheads’ cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love’. The idea was almost fully-formed before I made it home, which wasn’t long – I was never committed to running anyway. The fox in the song is passive, dying, but I have a tendency to think in a contradictory manner; antonyms come to mind before synonyms, and I began to imagine a fox that was defiant when facing death…

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Sam Vincent on gonzo ethnography in Blood and Guts

by Sam Vincent

Blood and Guts isn’t so much a work of investigative journalism as an exercise in gonzo ethnography. Over the summer of 2012-13 I sailed to Antarctica with the zealously vegan crew of Sea Shepherd’s flagship, the Steve Irwin – an experience that would form the (fake) meat of my book on the whaling controversy. I returned to land with ten notebooks brimming with notes, but I didn’t return with many formal interviews.

Spending literally every waking hour for three months…

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Lorelei Vashti on deliberate lies in Dress, Memory

by Lorelei Vashti

George Bernard Shaw said ‘All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.’ It sounds pretty harsh, but part of that quote appears as a disclaimer at the start of my book Dress, Memory because I really struggled to get my head around what is ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ while writing my memoir. I have learned that any time you attempt to craft a narrative from real events you will, in some sense, be telling…

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Favel Parrett on researching When the Night Comes

by Favel Parrett

In 2012, Favel Parrett won the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship, and was able to travel on Antarctic resupply vessel, Aurora Australis, in order to research her novel When the Night Comes. Here, she tells us about the voyage and shares an excerpt from her journal of the voyage.

It was a busy trip – a major re-supply of the base, plus passenger drop-off and pick-up. The ship carried over one million tonnes of fuel to offload, as…

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Paddy O’Reilly on misfits and monsters in literature

by Paddy O’Reilly

Paddy O’Reilly’s new novel, The Wonders, is populated with misfits of all kinds. Here, she talks on other misfits and monsters she’s loved in books.

We learn early what it is to be a misfit.

The first week at school the misfit will be spotted, singled out, made to understand she doesn’t belong. She’ll be left standing in a distant corner of the playground, looking at her hands or scanning the sky, trying to pretend it’s okay. At the…

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Rebecca Jessen on the influence of Dorothy Porter in Gap

by Rebecca Jessen

Rebecca Jessen’s award-winning verse novella, Gap , is a gripping crime thriller. Here, she talks about the influence of Australian poet Dorothy Porter on her work.

My first encounter with the work of late Australian poet Dorothy Porter was in mid 2011 in a second-hand bookshop in Newtown, Sydney. I picked up a copy of The Monkey’s Mask, intrigued by the two naked female bodies splayed across the cover. There’s something special about encountering an author’s work for the…

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Nic Low on designing the book cover for Arms Race

by Nic Low

Nic Low’s short-story collection, Arms Race , is a playful debut. Here, he shares the inspiration behind the book’s cover design, courtesy of WH Chong.

A few years ago, on a launch heading to a small island off New Zealand’s south coast, I thought I saw a giant octopus. It lay beneath the waves like a bruise. It was as wide as a downed jumbo jet. I figured something that big had to be powerful and old. The horizon was…

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The story of my book: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo

by Luke Ryan

Look, I realise cancer is not the most naturally hilarious subject. You rarely find yourself slaying at a dinner party with a selection of your best tumour-based one-liners. You never saw Rodney Dangerfield mugging to camera while saying ‘Whoa, when I said I wanted a cancer, I was talking about the star sign!’ I imagine most people probably place it in the Strictly No Laughing Matter basket alongside 9/11, the Holocaust and Daryl Somers.

Yet in November 2007, at the…

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The story of my book: Razorhurst

by Justine Larbalestier

I wrote Razorhurst because I moved to the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills in late 2005 and fell hopelessly in love with it. It’s a beautiful suburb full of narrow lanes, grand old pubs, terrace houses, warehouses—it still has a garment district though it’s not what it once was. There are multi-million dollar flats along side housing commission homes. The cashed-up newer residents have yet to drive out the older, poorer residents. There are still students and writers and newly…

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The story of my book: Lost & Found

by Brooke Davis

It’s May 2013. I’m sitting in a café in Nova Scotia, Canada, checking my emails, sipping on a cup of tea. My two brothers are there, too. We haven’t seen each other for a while, and they’re talking about music again. I can never keep up when they do this. Every band they mention is so obscure it sounds as if they’re making them up on the spot.

Their conversation goes something like this**:

‘Have you heard Candleface’s

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The story of my book: My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

At the start of 2011 I had a great idea.

I’d just left a primitive thatched hut after a year of wilderness survival skills and introspection. It was an archetypal story – a-woman-on-a-mission-of-self-discovery-in-the-wilds. There were ecstatic heights and existential lows, dangers and challenges, love affairs and conflict.

I’d write a book.

I did some research. According to Stephen King, if I pounded out 1000 words a day, in three months I’d have a draft. A friend from uni concurred, completing…

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Nicholas Walton-Healey on photography and poetry

by Nicholas Walton-Healey

In Land Before Lines Nicholas Walton-Healey presents sixty-eight unique photographic portraits of contemporary Victorian poets, with a revealing suite of poems written by each poet in response to their image. Here, he tells us why he started reading poetry in the first place, and still does so now.

I first encountered poetry in my final year of VCE when my English Literature teacher introduced our class to the work of Adrienne Rich. I remember going from Rich to Sexton to…

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The story of my book: Last Bets

by Michaela McGuire

I was overseas when I first read the news report, ‘Man dies in casino fray.’ I’d been scanning the newspapers for weeks out of homesickness and habit, but this headline caused my heart to stop beating as I waited for the story to load. A few weeks earlier, I’d had a huge fight with my boyfriend in a grand old casino in the Czech Republic. He wanted to gamble, and show off his Russian, and I wasn’t interested. I’ve always…

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The story of my book: Conversations with Creative Women: Volume II

by Tess McCabe

Producing the Conversations with Creative Women series was very much a classic case of creating the type of book I wanted to read.

I love learning about how people manage their small businesses, but I don’t love reading business books. I want to be inspired but I don’t want to be overwhelmed or feel that I can’t relate to other people’s paths to success. I want to read Australian stories. And I want to know how creative’s manage their careers…

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The Story of My Book: Prison Library

by Anne Ferran

Prison Library is about a very particular place – a library that used to exist inside Fremantle Maximum Security Prison in WA. Talk to anyone who grew up in the town when Fremantle Prison was still a working gaol and they’ll have stories of its looming presence in their lives: the high stone walls, razor wire, the guard towers and massive gates that they drove or walked past every day. Yet twenty-plus years after Fremantle Prison ceased to operate, its…

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The Story of My Book: Machine Wars by Michael Pryor

by Michael Pryor

Michael Pryor on the thinking behind his techno-thriller,

Humanity has been fascinated by mechanical people ever since the whole idea of machines came about. You can call them robots or automatons or androids or cyborgs, all with their own variations and differences, but what they really are is a reflection of us. Robots are us but with something extra – strength, or endurance, or some other sense. We comfort ourselves, though, by insisting that robots are lacking some of the…

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The story of my book: MONA by Dan Sehlberg

by Dan Sehlberg

Swedish author Dan Sehlberg tells us the story behind his techno-thriller, MONA.

MONA dates back to 1995, to my days at Aftonbladet, Scandinavia’s leading daily. One day we got a video-game from someone hoping for a review. With black and white graphics and a childish layout it seemed anything but exciting – a ping-pong ball jumping back and forth between two moving bricks. But it was not the game itself that was the big thing … it was…

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The story of my book: The Great Unknown

by Angela Meyer

While I was writing my thesis I’d get hooked on different TV series and watch episodes at night while my partner was at work. I managed to turn my Simpsons marathons into a chapter in my exegesis, and it was while watching the original series of The Twilight Zone that the book The Great Unknown was born. We can also thank social media.

I tweeted one night about entering the Zone and Bronwyn Mehan, the publisher at Spineless Wonders, told…

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The Story of My Book: The Rosie Project

by Graeme Simsion

Good writing, they say, is re-writing. I re-wrote The Rosie Project, beginning to end, at least seventy times.

It began as a screenplay. In 2007, I enrolled in the professional screenwriting program at RMIT, a radical change in life direction prompted by a one-off experiment with filmmaking a few years earlier. The resulting ‘no budget’ feature film was for family and friends’ eyes only, but kindled an interest in screenwriting and storytelling in general.

I wanted a project to…

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