Books

On the 18th June the shortlist for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award – an award now in it’s 60th year – was unveiled to the public. And what an exciting shortlist it was, with all five of this nominated authors shortlisted for the very first time! It was also great to see many of…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re going to know if you’re going to like a novel just from looking at the cover and the synopsis. Sometimes it’s handy to read a little bit of the novel, get a feel for it… realise you love it, want to read more, and go out and by…

On the 18th June the shortlist for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award – an award now in it’s 60th year – was unveiled to the public. And what an exciting shortlist it was, with all five of this nominated authors shortlisted for the very first time! It was also great to see many of…

We’re somehow half way through the year already! Thanks to international travel and the resulting jetlag this month’s list of the five books we think you need to be reading is a little later than planned. But here it is all the same. There’s still some time left to add them to your lists. This…

Welcome to this month’s round up of the books we think you need to be reading. It’s a bit of an eclectic mix this month, with a mixture of fiction, poetry and some non-fiction. We’ve got monsters, deplorables, teenagers and NDNs’. We move from the Hindu Kush, to Brooklyn, to Prague and to Australia. So…

An acclaimed group of Australian authors will travel to China next week for the tenth annual Australian Writers Week. The event,  supported by the Copyright Agency’s ‘Cultural Fund’ since 2014, is a significant opportunity for cultural exchange, with Australian authors getting the chance to travel across China sharing their stories, whilst also raising awareness of the…

Easter has come and gone for another year. Hopefully you’ve all eaten your fill of chocolate and hot cross buns. Now it’s time to gorge yourself on some new books, and April is proving to be a fantastic month for great new reads. There’s plenty to choose from this month, but here are the five…

The program for the 20th Sydney Writers’ Festival was announced at the end of last week – and for those literary types not in Sydney there is going to be some serious festival envy. Taking place across six days from May 22nd to May 28th, the festival boasts over 450 writers taking part in 400…

With the post-Christmas lull out of the way, March has proven to be a great month for new releases. In fact it was pretty hard to whittle the list down to just five this month, with plenty of titles catching my eye. But here are our five picks for the books you absolutely must read…

Earlier this year it was announced that remote publishing house Magabala Books had teamed up with the Copyright Agency and the Australian Literacy Educators Association to devise a series of specially created teaching resources for 15 Indigenous stories, which will be made available to teachers via the Reading Australia website. The resources were devised and…

In an announcement timed to coincide with International Women’s Day, the longlist for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has been unveiled. Now in its 22nd year, and fourth year in partnership with Baileys, the prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women, in English, from around the world. Set up in…

International Women’s Day is the backdrop for yet another literary award announcement, with the shortlist for the 2017 Stella Prize being unveiled to the public. The Stella Prize, named for Stella Maria Sarah ‘Miles’ Franklin, is an annual prize dedicated to celebrating Australian women’s contribution to literature and is open to both fiction and non-fiction…

Well somehow we’ve found ourselves in the middle of February with March fast approaching so it’s about time for another of our monthly features where we pick five books you need to be reading that month. Once again the five books have an international feel to them, with a handful of books from American writers,…

In recent weeks, all across Australia, teachers and children have headed back into the classroom and jumped into the new school year. Classrooms have been organised and decorated. Lessons have been planned and resources printed and created. In 2017, however, there will be a new set of resources made available to primary school teachers across…

Happy New Year! Welcome back to a new instalment of our recommended reading monthly feature (now with fresh new artwork). Hopefully you all had a great break away from work and enjoyed some downtime over the festive period. As always we’re here to bring you five books we think you need to be reading this…

It’s December! The Festive Season… The Silly Season… You get the point. Christmas or not, we’re back with another five books we think you need to be reading this month – or gifting – so if you’ve still got a few people left to buy for, keep reading. This month we’ve got a movie-set memoir…

You might have noticed that the world has gone a little bit Star Wars crazy these last couple of months. There’s been novels, movies – just released – memoirs by stars, and now a biography of the creator, the man behind it all – George Lucas. George Lucas: A Life is the new biography from…

Mulga’s Magical Musical Creatures is the latest release from the Sydney-based artist, illustrator and poet Mulga (Joel Moore). Formerly a financial advisor, Mulga’s artwork can be found all over Australia, from cafes to shop fronts, from t-shirts to drink bottles and now once again on your bookshelves – or in this case your children’s bookshelves…

Paul Beatty has taken home the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout – becoming the first American to win the award. The Sellout is a searing and, incredibly topical, satire of race relations in contemporary America. The novel is narrated by African-American Bonbon, a resident of a run-down town in Los Angeles, which…

It’s been announced today that Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 – marking the first time the prize has gone to a recipient who is primarily a musician. The Swedish Academy in awarding the prized cited that Dylan had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”….

Ahead of the release of his new children’s book Mulga’s Magical Musical Creatures we sat down with Sydney-based street artist, illustrator and poet Mulga (Joel Moore) to find out a little bit more about the new book, how he created those illustrations, and just what makes the perfect children’s book. What was the initial inspiration behind…

The 2016 Shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been unveiled, and once again it makes for some interesting reading. Past winners, and literary heavyweights have found themselves dispensed with as the judges have agonisingly whittled down the long list to a mere six titles. The six authors and books that made the shortlist then…

The short story, is perhaps one of the most underappreciated of the literary forms. Certainly it’s a format with its readers and, naturally, writers, but it’s never quite had the audience or the celebrity it’s longer form cousins – the novel – have. But all that could be able to change, with the launch of…

Earlier this week, the shortlist for this year’s Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction was announced. The Readings Prize, created by the award winning independent book retailer, unsurprisingly (given it’s title) celebrates new works for Australian authors, with the judges considering the first or second books by an author, and shining a light on those…

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is on track to be the fastest selling book this decade, with the script book shifting approximately 170,000 copies in Australia alone since it’s release on Sunday. Though official figures will not be released until next week, that is a staggering figure,  but will come as no surprise to those…

The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize was announced overnight in the UK. The thirteen books on the list were whittled down from over 150 submissions  by a panel of five judges. Those five judges now have until 13th September to decide on a six book shortlist, before the eventual winner is announced on the…

April 23rd marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. To commemorate the occasion the State Library of NSW is staging a major Shakespeare celebration; headlined by acclaimed Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly. The celebration will see Kelly launch his new Shakespeare inspired album, Seven Sonnets & A Song, in the atmospheric Mitchell Reading…

Ubisoft® and Scholastic have announced a collaboration on a new young adult book series, Last Descendants, based on the hit video game franchise Assassin’s Creed®. Written for readers ages 12 and up by award-winning author Matthew J. Kirby, the first book in the “Last Descendants” series will launch simultaneously in September 2016 in the United…

Carriageworks and Sydney Writers’ Festival are partnering to present a Sydney Writers’ Festival Carriageworks Edition with two talks by internationally renowned authors: Simon Winchester, for his only Sydney appearance to discuss his new biography Pacific Ocean, and Andrew O’Hagan author of The Illuminations, which was long-listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. The public will have a chance to join bestselling author Simon…

A whole host of local and international authors, writers and public thinkers will be decamping to Adelaide at the end of February for the 31st instalment of the Adelaide Writers’ Week; a week long celebration as part of the Adelaide Festival. The event will feature over 90 writers in conversation, across six days from the…