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.
Royals, it seems, have their tenacious uses, often fictive. Contemporaries such as Alan Bennett and Edward St Aubyn have deployed them. One hundred years ago, Ford Madox Ford wrote his singular trilogy (1906–08) about Katharine Howard, The Fifth Queen of Henry VIII. Now the esteemed novelist and memoirist Hilary Mantel returns to the Tudor world, again with revisionist intent.
Wolf Hall, publis ... (read more)
While the Brits prepare to traipse up and down The Mall brandishing their Union Jacks and Coronation Chicken to fête our remote head of state’s Diamond Jubilee, what better way to mark a rather more momentous local milestone – the centenary of Patrick White’s birthday (28 May 2012) – than by reading the man again, and reading one’s favourite book by him, after more years than on ... (read more)
To Canberra on 12 April for the opening of a new travelling exhibition, The Life of Patrick White.
First, though, a quick dash that morning to Sydney for a meeting with Bernadette Brennan and Hilary McPhee. The three of us have been judging this year’s National Biography Award. We met in the small but spectacular Shakespeare Room at the Mitchell Library. First we shortlisted six of the dozen hi ... (read more)
Hot off the press – possibly the longest of recorded literary longlists, for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, which is worth $50,000 – not quite prime ministerial, but still premiership material, and well worth winning, apart from the kudos attached to Australia’s pre-eminent literary competition.
Of the sixty-one novels entered in the Award, the judges have longlisted thirteen. ... (read more)
To Her Majesty’s for the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse production of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Pinter’s sixth play, it opened in April 1960 and ran forever (444 performances), his first commercial success, though by no means his first critical one (Harold Hobson had famously extolled the short-lived Birthday Party two years earlier.)
The gently raked stage, littered with junk and de ... (read more)
To Adelaide for the last day of Writers’ Week, now an annual affair (ambitiously, some think) under the guidance of Laura Kroetsch (Director). Ms Kroetsch, an American, joins Adelaide from Wellington, where she ran the literary festival for many years. The removal of long-time director Rose Wight created some heat in certain quarters, but I didn’t share the forebodings about what Ms Kroetsch m ... (read more)
One of the things we try to do at ABR is to note each month a sample, however small, of some of the best publishing from overseas – especially works that are unlikely to be reviewed extensively, or at all, in this country (beyond the learned journals, if they bother with them). Many significant titles that pop up in TLS, Harper’s, LRB and NYRB go unreviewed in Australia – largely because sto ... (read more)
From time to time I’m asked what I look for in our reviewers – apart from wit, fleetness, and excellent grammar, that is. Well might a prospective reviewer ask, because the craft of reviewing is not one that is often discussed, or taught, or analysed. You’re on your own: a one-person, low-income cottage industry, a hostage to your telephone and computer, as I have written elsewhere.
... (read more)
by Peter Rose
January 6
Such high standards the American magazines maintain, with their enviable resources. Fine valedictory article in the New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates on the death of her husband of four decades. Slightly uneasy, though, to realise that Oates, in her forensic way, was gathering data for such an article while he was failing.
But the magazines can still terrify. Harper’s In ... (read more)