Our latest blog posts

NAW Reading Challenge: Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke

To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.

This week our participants have read Foreign Soil by Maxine Beneba Clarke. Here are our favourite responses from them to the book. (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)

Jill says:

After the first story, ‘David’, I wondered if I could simply write “Wow!” about this collection and leave it at that. This powerful piece intertwines two stories, the young woman in Australia…

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Winners of the 2014 Inky Awards

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Inky Awards!

The First Third by Will Kostakis is the winner of the Gold Inky Award.

All the Truth That’s in Me by Julie Berry is the winner of the Silver Inky Award. (Read our review of the book here.)

The Inky Awards recognise high-quality young adult literature, with the longlist and shortlist selected by young adults, and the winners voted for online by the teen readers. The Gold Inky Award is…

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Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2014 Shortlist

The 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards shortlists have been announced! Established in 2008, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are Australia’s richest literary prize with a total prize pool of $600,000 to winners and shortlisted authors across the six categories.

The following books were shortlisted in each award category:

Fiction

A World of Other People by Steven Carroll (HarperCollins)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (Vintage Australia)

The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane (Penguin: Hamish Hamilton)

Coal

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What we're reading: Helen Garner, Sarah Waters, Tim Winton and Marilynne Robinson

Each week we bring you a sample of the books we’re reading, the films we’re watching, the television shows we’re hooked on or the music we’re loving.

Mark Rubbo is reading This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial by Helen Garner

I’ve almost finished This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial – what a roller coaster of a book! It has to be Helen’s best book yet and so readable; I’m pretty sure Farquarson…

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Beautiful Friendships in Children's Books

by Emily Gale

“Friendship,” said Christopher Robin, “is a very comforting thing to have.” - A.A. Milne

If children’s books were your only guide to friendship, you’d be in very good hands. Here are five of our favourites.

Claude and Sir Bobblysock (Alex T. Smith)

Many people have tried and failed to anthropomorphise objects and animals but this partnership of a dog and a sock really works. Claude is bright-eyed and eager to explore the world while his owners, Mr and Mrs Shinyshoes…

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The best of 33⅓

by Chad Parkhill

The 33⅓ series of books is based on a deceptively simple concept: each instalment is a short critical monograph about a seminal pop music album. Since its inception, the series has displayed a diversity not only in terms of the albums covered – some of which sit very far outside of the traditional pop music canon indeed – but also in terms of the approaches that the series’ authors take to those albums. Although each entry in the series –…

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We catch up with the authors shortlisted for the Readings Children's Book Prize

by Emily Gale

2014 was a whirlwind year for the launch of the Readings Children’s Book Prize. Outgoing prize manager Emily Gale hails the beginning of the 2015 prize and catches up with what last year’s shortlisted authors did next.

Managing the first year of the Reading Children’s Book Prize has been the highlight of my time as a children’s buyer at Readings Carlton, concluding with the announcement in June of Tasmanian author Julie Hunt as the winner. Julie’s Song For A Scarlet

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Richard Flanagan wins the 2014 Man Booker

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his ‘savagely beautiful and haunting’ sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which tells the stories of prisoners and captors on the infamous Thai-Burma railway.

The philosopher AC Grayling, who chaired the judges, said: ‘The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war. Written in prose of extraordinary elegance and force, it…

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NAW Reading Challenge: An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman

To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.

This week our participants have read An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman. Here are their responses to the novel. (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)

Our favourite response for this week (not to mention the winner of our $100 gift voucher) is…

Sam says:

An Elegant Young Man is the result of a single writer attempting to clash together two oppositional…

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