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Peter Rose
In 2001 Peter Rose became the Editor of Australian Book Review. Previously he was a publisher at Oxford University Press. He has published several books of poetry, an award-winning family memoir, Rose Boys, and two novels, the most recent being Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate, 2010). His latest poetry collections are Rag (Gazebo Books, 2023) and Attention, Please! (Pitt Street Poetry, February 2025). His extensive criticism appears in a variety of publication, including ABR. Rose writes and performs short absurdist plays with The Highly Strung Players.
Australian Book Review, while congratulating successful applicants, deplores the Australia Council’s decision not to fund it and other literary magazines in the 2021–24 round. For the first time in decades, Australia’s national literary and arts review will not be funded by the federal government.
In depriving ABR and other fine literary magazines of funding, the Council and ... (read more)
‘Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.’
Donald Justice, ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’
I think of you now for the first timein about five times as many yearsas you actually lived, so uncomplainingly,they always said, as they do of the dead.Your name shadows meas we shadowed your small coffin,toggle-straight in our uniforms –why, I have no idea, for my ... (read more)
After a summer of bushfires across the nation and phenomenal loss and destruction, Australia – like the rest of world – now faces a health crisis of fearsome scope. As we go to press (earlier than planned because of present uncertainties), the scale of the threat, unprecedented in our times, is becoming stark.
Australian Book Review is mindful of the enormous challenges posed by the coronavir ... (read more)
Gale Edwards’s production of La Bohème is back for an extended summer season – sixteen performances no less. This production has been filling theatres since its creation in 2011. It may not run for as long as Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 extravaganza, still an annual fixture at the Metropolitan Opera, but it probably has another good decade to go. Revived here by Liesel Badorrek, it works consi ... (read more)
Reviewing the recent production of Madama Butterfly in Adelaide, I dwelt on Giacomo Puccini’s ceaseless search for new subjects between operas and how he considered everything from a Zola novel to the historical Marie Antoinette before settling on the story of Cio-Cio San.
The path to Turandot, his final, unfinished opera, was similarly curious. Puccini, the world’s most famous composer, ... (read more)
‘Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.’
Franz Kafka, 7 January 1911
Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in ... (read more)
With certain artists – the luminaries, the abiders – it’s tempting to assign a kind of inevitability to their oeuvres. The musicals of Cole Porter, the satires of Jane Austen, the exiguous poems of T.S. Eliot have a kind of perfection that make them seem nonchalant. But here we run the risk of overlooking the sheer chanciness of most artistic careers – not to mention the false starts and t ... (read more)
Three years ago, almost to the day, the great Swedish soprano Nina Stemme made her Australian début – in Hobart, a little unexpectedly. Joining her was Stuart Skelton, with whom she had just performed in Mariusz Treliński’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera – a sombre, martial, digital creation that divided critics and audiences alike (‘overdetermined darkness an ... (read more)
In David Malouf’s second and perhaps most celebrated novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), of which this new novella is so reminiscent, the Roman poet Ovid is exiled to a primitive village named Tomis. Ovid, ‘called Naso because of the nose’, has been banished due to his unspoken affronts. In Tomis, Ovid, doomed and apart, senses that he must acquire in simplicity a new kind of wisdom:
Must it ... (read more)