It must have been late on some Saturday afternoon (foolishly) driving on Punt Road, the traffic backed up, the city engaged in a giant logistical pantomime of cars and trains and everywhere people in team colors, all jammed together, inching along, when the idea for The Family Men first came to me. A friend of mine had been working on a verse novel, and I was seeing the world through a scrim of metaphors and half-rhyme, time slowing and expanding…

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How to Be Both by Ali Smith

I’m immediately engaged by the cover of Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, probably because of its clean use of type paired with a nice image, a design decision I’m particularly partial to. On the front cover is a photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy – two French pop singers involved in the yé-yé movement that emerged in France, Italy and Spain in the early 1960s. As How to Be Both…

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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.

Nina is reading The Actress by Amy Sohn

I’m reading Amy Sohn’s The Actress, the story of a young up-and-coming actress who falls into a romance with an older, charismatic movie star. Throw in some dark secrets, relationship drama and Hollywood glamour and the whole thing sounds sounds a little like a…

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Last month we announced our inaugural shortlist for the Readings New Australian Writing Award! This Award is for an Australian author’s first or second book of fiction, and recognises exciting and exceptional new literary talent.

To celebrate the shortlist, we’ve asked each of our six shortlisted authors five quick questions.

Click here to read our Q&A with Christine Piper, author of After Darkness.

Click here to read our Q&A with Luke Carman, author of An Elegant Young Man.

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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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