Geordie Williamson
Jennifer Maiden's The Fox Petition: New Poems (Giramondo) conjures foxes 'whose eyes were ghosts with pity' and foxes of language that transform the world's headlines
... (read more)The missing novels: our critics nominate some overlooked classics
Book reviewing and its provocateurs: 'What single development would most improve the Australian critical culture?'
Last month in Melbourne, a group of book reviewers and literary editors took part in a conference organised by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. There were more than thirty short papers, or ‘provocations’, as they were styled. Our Editor lamented the low or non-payment of some reviewers ( ...
Geordie Williamson reviews 'Poetry Notebook 2006–2014' by Clive James
Poetry ‘cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood’, wrote Zbigniew Herbert in 1948: ‘It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.’ Nothing could be more truly said of Clive James’s approach to poetry. His latest assemblage of essays, reviews, and miscellanea, collected over the years that straddle his diagnosis of leukemia, feel necessary as oxygen. There is a quiet restlessness too: a sense of sorting papers into some final order.
... (read more)Books of the Year is always one our most popular features. Find out what our 41 contributors liked most this year – and why.
... (read more)Critic of the Month: Interview with Geordie Williamson
Saturday, 01 November 2014When did you first write for ABR?
It was 2001. A dual review of Malcolm Knox’s début novel, Summerland, and Steven Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver. Luckily, I was generous about these relatively unknown authors and their books, since both went on to become significant figures in Australian letters.
... (read more)2017 Calibre Essay Prize Judges
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
Sheila Fitzpatrick, a professor at the University of Sydney specialising in the history of modern Russia, is one of the world’s most influential Soviet historians. She is the author of two memoirs, My Father’s Daughter (2010) and A Spy ...
Bernadette Brennan reviews 'The Burning Library: Great Novelists Lost and Found' by Geordie Williamson
As a reader, teacher, and scholar of Australian literature, I applaud any initiative directed towards increasing readers’ understanding of, and engagement with, Australian writing. Geordie Williamson’s The Burning Library sets out to achieve that goal. Through a mix of biography and literary review, Williamson seeks to recuperate the work and reputation of fifteen Australian writers whom he judges to have been underappreciated or sidelined by academics, publishers, and, consequently, the reading public. His stable of writers includes Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw, Xavier Herbert, Christina Stead, Dal Stivens, Patrick White, Jessica Anderson, Sumner Locke Elliott, Amy Witting, Olga Masters, David Ireland, Elizabeth Harrower, Thomas Keneally, Randolph Stow, and Gerald Murnane.
... (read more)Geordie Williamson reviews 'The Best Australian Essays 2010' edited by Robert Drewe
Michel de Montaigne thought little of constancy. It was change in slow motion, he said – ‘a more languishing movement’. The first and still the most miraculous exponent of the essay form instead bragged about his embrace of all that fluctuates: ‘I do not portray being; I portray passing; not a passage of one age to another ... but from day to day, from minute to minute.’
... (read more)Geordie Williamson reviews 'Mark Twain: The adventures of Samuel L. Clemens' by Jerome Loving
Ernest Hemingway once wrote that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’. We might add that Oz Lit owes Twain a little something, too.
... (read more)