Carmel Bird
Carmel Bird is the author of Writing the Story of Your Life (2007). Her recent novel is Child of the Twilight (2010), and her children’s picture book Fabulous Finola Fox has just been published.
At some stage in every workshop on the art of memoir somebody raises the question of ethics, of privacy, and of who has the right to tell a version of a story. How far, the author of Reaching One Thousand asks, is she prepared to ‘sacrifice other people’s privacy’? What betrayals will she ‘perpetrate on others’?
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A book’s epigraph doesn’t often feel like a direct personal statement to the reader, but the one in Thought Crimes, drawn from Ionesco, is just that: ‘You got stuck in the mud of life. You felt warm and cosy. (Sharply) Now you’re going to freeze.’ Imagine the world as a jigsaw from which the author has removed some pieces, substituting them with his own pieces – but which ones are ... (read more)
Stories of the impact of European discovery, exploration, invasion, and settlement on Australia are naturally a source of fascination to novelists. The microcosm of the island of Tasmania, with its cruel yet beautiful landscape and its unforgiving weather, offers these stories with a special kind of eerie horror. Against this setting, the stories emerge both in concert and in counterpoint, describ ... (read more)
Jane Sullivan’s novel, which was runner-up in the 2010 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for a novel by a writer over thirty-five years of age, blends the powerful theme of dogged maternal love with the extraordinary world of P.T. Barnum’s freak shows.
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Maris Morton’s novel is the winner of the Scribe CAL Fiction Prize for 2010. The Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) has this year contributed to raising the prize money to $15,000. The winning manuscript, and the runners-up, are published by Scribe Publications. In a world where many prizes are won by experienced writers, and where there are special prizes for young writers, the Scr ... (read more)