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 o…

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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**:

‘Ha…

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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 …

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I first encountered poetry in my final year of VCE when my English Literature teacher introduced…

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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’…

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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 …

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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…

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Michael Pryor on the thinking behind his techno-thriller, Machine Wars, for readers of 10+.

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 – stren…

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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 …

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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 Meha…

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