Advances
In 2013, Australian Book Review broadened its review content to include the arts. Since then we have reviewed theatre, film, opera, music, dance, and the visual arts – not just literature. This development was in response to the decline of arts criticism in our newspapers and in recognition of our readers’ eclectic interests.
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ABR has had a long association with Readings, a Melbourne icon with eight stores across the city and a buoyant online shop. Readings – a regular Independent Bookseller of the Year over the years – is renowned for its customer service and the quality of its stock.
The Readings Foundation, created by Mark Rubbo in 2009, assists Victorian organisations that support the development of literacy, community integration, and the arts. Since 2009, the Readings Foundation has donated more than $2 million to organisations that support our most vulnerable people.
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Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.
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Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian.
... (read more)Welcome to our many new subscribers who have joined us in the past couple of months, including a large number in NSW and the ACT, further evidence (if we needed it) of the value of our new partnership with the National Library of Australia. We hope you enjoy the September issue.
... (read more)On 15 August, Advances and about one hundred lovers of short fiction descended on Gleebooks in Sydney for the announcement of the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Not since January 2020 had ABR presented a prize ceremony in public. Since then, because of the exigencies of Covid-19 and pesky lockdowns, all our celebrations have happened online, and goodness knows the popularity of online events of this kind has begun to wane, like those Zoom soirées and cocktail parties we endured.
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The Jolley Prize
This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,310 entries. Of these, 413 came from overseas, attesting to the high regard in which the Jolley Prize – one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English –is held internationally.
Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (Adelaide), Melinda Harvey (Melbourne), and Susan Midalia (Perth) – longlisted thirteen stories from twelve different writers (John Kinsella doubled up). These are all listed on our website, and we congratulate the longlisted authors.
... (read more)Last month, in more confessional mode than usual (needs must!), we wrote about ABR’s funding predicament in 2024: without federal funds and with only one state arts grant. Readers seemed shocked by the stark comparison between 2019 (when ABR received a total of $245,000 from six governments around the country) and 2024 (a total of $12,000, all from Arts South Australia).
Since then the response from supporters – regular donors and a pleasing number of new ABR Patrons (all listed on page 4) – has been extraordinary. Pace sceptics who always said that Australians will never support literature in the same way they support other sectors and related charities, ABR continues to receive sterling support from those who believe that Australia deserves a sophisticated literary magazine culture of its own, not just an imported one.
... (read more)The season of giving
Close readers of our Patrons page will note many new additions to this month’s listing, including several substantial donations. Some of these followed a Melbourne function on 1 May, at which ABR Editor Peter Rose, ABR Chair Sarah Holland-Batt, and ABR Laureate Robyn Archer all spoke. This was an opportunity for ABR to thank its many supporters and to highlight new developments and opportunities.
... (read more)Calibre Essay Prize
Tracey Slaughter – a poet, fiction writer, and essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand – has won the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. Her name will be familiar to ABR readers: she was runner-up in the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Overseas writers have been shortlisted for Calibre in the past, but Tracey becomes the first to claim first prize.
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