Rosemary Sorensen
Rosemary Sorensen is a journalist, formerly books editor of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, and arts writer at The Australian. She is currently director of Bendigo Writers Festival.
Douglas Kennedy is one of that group of travel writers who are annoyingly good at getting an angle on a story but never really making a point. He whisks us around the world, in this case around the money markets of the world, observing, picking up quotable quotes, telling tidy anecdotes, and in the end, back home, he snaps the lid on his collected experience and calls it a day. Easy listening, but ... (read more)
Now over seventy, Benoîte Groult of the fierce name and fiercer disposition, has written a delightful story about sex and desire that is sure to turn heads. Its central character is a woman named George – as in Sand, and she is small and chic like that writer. (If you thought that George Sand was a formidable hulk of a woman with coarse hair and thin lips, this book points out that she was a li ... (read more)
Men are running scared, says David Foster, in the wake of ‘uppity’ women who want to emasculate them. In conversation with him about his new book, Mates of Mars, Rosemary Sorensen contemplates the rules and codes of chivalric fighting.
David is a little defensive as he answers the door to me in Bundanoon, where he lives with Gerda and hordes of children. He’s not too impressed with literary ... (read more)
When Dorothy Hewett won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction with the first volume of her autobiography, Wild Card, it was a popular choice on the night. She’s a writer who has attracted all kinds of controversy, from libel suits to outrage over her flamboyant politics, both sexual and social. She has published four volumes of poetry, thirteen plays, but only one novel, calle ... (read more)
Drusilla Modjeska has written a book of essays on women writers, Exiles at Home, and the award-winning semi-autobiography Poppy. And now, with The Orchard, the essay meets the autobiographical and both come out very differently indeed. Drusilla Modjeska begins by patiently explaining why the question, is this fiction or non-fiction?, is relevant to her writing.
It has a relevance in one sense bec ... (read more)
Douglas Kennedy is one of that group of travel writers who are annoyingly good at getting an angle on a story but never really making a point. He whisks us around the world, in this case around the money markets of the world, observing, picking up quotable quotes, telling tidy anecdotes, and in the end, back home, he snaps the lid on his collected experience and calls it a day. Easy listening, but ... (read more)
This was an extraordinary task you set yourself. How did you decide to do it in the first place?
I was actually asked to do it. Lesley Mackay, who has a bookshop in Double Bay that I go to, was doing a bit of publishing and packaging, and it suddenly occurred to her that while there was a Writer’s France and a Writer’s Britain there hadn’t been a Writer’s Australia, so she came to me with ... (read more)
Because it’s the end of the year, every Tom, Dick and Harry is trotting out the Top Books of the Year, My Favourite Summer Reading, What Book I’d Like for Christmas – good old standbys. ABR, however, is looking soberly (for the most part) at the current state of critical writing. Critics and scholars and researchers talking about theory and analysis. People engaged in the processes that help ... (read more)
In the fictional town of Blosseville, the dirty core of politics is being revealed, and lawyers are having to examine their consciences … for Perth writer, Nicholas Hasluck, the themes are intriguing, as he explains to Rosemary Sorensen.
Are you a regional writer?
I suppose I am, if your definition of a regional writer is someone who evokes atmosphere and themes which have a particular relev ... (read more)