Judith Wright
The Poetry of Judith Wright:: A search for unity by Shirley Walker
Nine Lives: Postwar Women Writers Making Their Mark by Susan Sheridan
My Blood’s Country: In the footsteps of Judith Wright by Fiona Capp
Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life by Brigid Rooney
With Love and Fury edited by Patricia Clarke and Meredith McKinney & Portrait of a Friendship edited by Bryony Cosgrove
Early last year, Phillip Adams interviewed the British author Pat Barker on his radio programme, Late Night Live. Pat Barker is a novelist who has journeyed into history, most famously in her Regeneration trilogy about World War I, where she fictionalises real, historical individuals. Adams asked her: ‘Which is better at getting at the truth? Fiction or history?’ Her answer was: ‘Oh, fiction every time.’ Barker is a novelist for whom violence and the fear of violence has been a recurrent, powerful theme. She argued that fiction allowed her to ‘slow down’ the horror so that she and her readers could think about it as it happened. In real life she felt that violence was often so swift and shocking that all one could do was recoil. Fiction gave her freedoms that helped her to convey truth.
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