"Homecoming" is a significant novel in terms of its author’s trajectory. A novel of ideas with a fully Australian focus, it moves him from the niche of slightly magical-realist Indian tales into the mainstream. It is bold, ...

Alex Skovron has always been a clever poet, sometimes playfully so, more often seriously so. Skovron, who was born in Poland in 1948 and came to Australia, via Israel, in 1958, is steeped in the European intellectual ...

Not Since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir ...

This essay is a discussion of Hilary's Mantel's writing, especially her recently-published memoir which tells of her childhood, her development into a writer and her battle with serious illness.

Menadue is a charming storyteller, self-reflective and free of cant. He charts his uneven acceptance of his own homosexuality; the compartmentalisation of his life between work, family and sexuality; the exploration of sex ...

This article is a review of "The Indigo Book of Modern Australian Sonnets" by Geoff Page (ed).

Like M.T.C. Cronin's earlier collections, "beautiful, unfinished" is characterised by a mixture of mystical awe and formal restraint. The collection is subtitled ‘PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM’. As this suggests, it consists of ...

Geoffrey Blainey is seventy-three years old and has published thirty-two books. Since his last book was a history of the world, one might have assumed that he had reached the end of his career. But he is not done yet. He ...

Jack Gregory has devoted much of his long career in China studies to teaching and studying the ways in which the West and China have interrelated. He is well qualified to write on the subject. Classes that Gregory has given ...

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, literary awards ‘are extraordinarily arbitrary, sometimes stubbornly evading those who most deserve them while besieging and overwhelming those who merit them least’. Many of the world’s ...