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Carol Middleton
Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author, based in Melbourne. Her short story awards include second place in The Age competition 2010. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the anthologies Melbourne Subjective, Ink3 and Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She is working on a memoir in essays.
Boccaccio started an avalanche of storytelling with The Decameron. His one hundred tales, told by ten narrators taking refuge from the Black Death in a villa outside Florence, have inspired a horde of copycats over the ensuing 660 years. Most famous of these is The Canterbury Tales. Although Don Aitkin's title echoes Chaucer's, his collection of stories pays higher tribute to Boccaccio's and share ... (read more)
In 2009 Sonya Voumard read about a legal claim brought by Martin Bryant's mother, Carleen, against journalists Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro, accusing them of using her personal manuscript, letters, and family photos without her permission in their book Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer. Struck by the complex ethics of the case, Voumard found herself, in the words of ... (read more)
Western Australian novelist and academic Liz Byrski has written a memoir that explores the reality behind a World War II myth: the ground-breaking work done by plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe to repair the disfigured faces, hands, and lives of fighter pilots and crews. Byrski grew up during the war in East Grinstead, Sussex, near the hospital where McIndoe worked, and was haunted by the sight of ... (read more)
In her long-form essay Dear Life, columnist and fiction writer Karen Hitchcock considers how we in Australia treat the elderly and dying. To the task she brings her formidable skills as a writer and her experience at the coalface, working as a staff physician in a Melbourne public hospital. The result is a sensitive, rigorous, and moving account that exposes the prevailing ageism in our medical se ... (read more)
Graeme Leith’s intention in writing this memoir was to pass on his knowledge and experience as chief winemaker of Passing Clouds winery in Victoria. Along the way, he discovered there was a lot more to say about his seventy-three years of life as an adventurer, larrikin, and family man. The result is almost an autobiography, complete with photographs, tracing his hard-working life from the Melbo ... (read more)
Apart from a brief stint as an actor, Hannie Rayson has spent her professional life writing plays, fourteen of them. Now she has shone the spotlight on her own life and brought her sense of dramatic conflict, emotional range and laugh-out-loud humour to her memoir, Hello, Beautiful!
... (read more)
This début novel by poet and author Robyn Cadwallader has its genesis in her PhD thesis on attitudes to virginity in the Middle Ages. Set in England in 1255, it is the story of Sarah, an anchoress or religious recluse, who chooses to be shut into a stone cell, measuring seven by nine paces, for life. She is seventeen.
... (read more)
Jumpy, by British playwright April De Angelis and directed by Pamela Rabe, opens Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2015 season. First produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2011, it is a modern-day comedy of manners whose plot and subject matter owe much to the television sitcom. Its humour relies on bedroom intrigues, blunt sexual dialogue, marital dissatisfaction, and the laments of middle ag ... (read more)
Susan Mitchell’s fifteenth book is a biography of the Whitlams, published shortly before Gough’s death in November. As a broadcaster, journalist, and author who has examined the lives of prominent Australian women, Mitchell tells the story mainly from Margaret’s perspective. This is not surprising: Mitchell had already amassed a huge body of research for her book Margaret Whitlam: A Biograph ... (read more)