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Naama Grey-Smith
Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, writer, and critic based in Fremantle/Walyalup, Western Australia. She holds degrees in communications and publishing and has edited award-winning fiction and non-fiction. Her enduring interests are language, memory, and place.
In conversation with the Guardian’s Paul Daley in the final days of 2021, Tony Birch addressed the recurring presence of both strong women and violent men in his work. Citing the Sydney writer Ross Gibson, Birch said he likes to think of the common themes that a writer revisits across his or her body of work as ‘reiterations’. In Birch’s oeuvre, perhaps chief among these reiterations is th ... (read more)
The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.
In The Sitter (University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 180 pp), Angela O’Keeffe explores this tripartite relationship – arti ... (read more)
Centuries before the Kremlin had a digital presence and long before Ivermectin was trending on Twitter, an early form of disinformation campaigning emerged in medieval Europe: blood libel. These anti-Semitic accusations claimed that Christian children were being killed as part of Jewish religious ritual, a lie used to justify violence against Jewish communities.
A notable historical instance of b ... (read more)
James Burgmann-Milner (writing under the suitably sci-fi alias J.R. Burgmann) knows his cli-fi, or climate fiction. A teaching associate at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, he received his PhD for research on the representation and communication of anthropogenic climate change in literature and other popular media. He is the co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A s ... (read more)
'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Albert Einstein wrote these words, originally in German, in his book The World As I See It (1934). He went on to describe the ‘knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate’ as constituting ‘the truly religious attitude’, addin ... (read more)
Winner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is Brendan Colley’s first book. As it happens, my review copy arrived just as I launched into Rhett Davis’s Hovering (2022). Although fundamentally different, both novels open with a fraught return to a family home and a resident resentful sibling. Both pr ... (read more)
Where We Swim takes the broad view on each component of its title: the ‘where’, the ‘we’, the ‘swim’. Wellington-based author Ingrid Horrocks explains that her original idea – to record a series of solo swims – was transformed when she realised such deliberate solitary excursions were ‘bracketed moments held deep within lives’ and that their contrivance ‘felt too close to the ... (read more)
Subtitled ‘Encounters with love, death and faith’, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer takes on big themes. In this work of creative non-fiction that combines memoir, journalism, and philosophical inquiry, Krasnostein details her meetings with people whose beliefs she finds unfathomable but whom she is driven to understand. Her own guiding faith on this journey is that ‘we are united in the e ... (read more)
‘Every last word that follows from here is a word I have tortured out of myself. If what I have written sometimes warbles towards the inarticulate, that is the price exacted by torture and the price of articulating ... at all.’ So warns the narrator of Daniel Davis Wood’s first novel, Blood and Bone (2014). He may well be describing Davis Wood’s second novel, At the Edge of the Solid World ... (read more)