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Australian Book Review
Nam Le is the author of The Boat (2009). He has received the Dylan Thomas Prize (2008), the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Book of the Year (2009) and the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award (2009), among other prizes. His fiction has been widely anthologised. Currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he divides his time between ... (read more)
Celebrating Calibre
Dear Editor,
This is a note to congratulate you on the quality of the latest Calibre Prize essays, by Jane Goodall and Kevin Brophy, in the April edition of ABR. The two pieces maintain the incredibly high standards of the Prize, of which I was honoured to be an inaugural judge.
As you know, I’m a staunch supporter of the essay. Walter Murdoch, one of only a handful of Aus ... (read more)
From Beatrice to Julia
Jacqueline Kent chooses the most interesting biographical subjects. Her first was Beatrice Davis, doyenne of Australian book editors. A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life won the National Biography Award in 2002. Next came An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah Menuhin (2008). Now we read with interest that she is writing the biography of Julia Gillard, the d ... (read more)
Marcus Clarke’s cigar
Biographies, exhaustively researched, can take years, even decades to write – Jill Roe’s recent life of Miles Franklin is a good example – but few have to wait a century for a publisher. Written in 1906 and sold as a handwritten manuscript to the Mitchell Library in 1926, Cyril (brother of Gerard Manley) Hopkins’s obscure ‘Biographical Notice of the Life & Wo ... (read more)
A question of genocide
Dear Editor,
Defending Inga Clendinnen against my criticisms (ABR, July 2001), John Clendinnen attributes to her a controversial view about the nature of moral judgment. I don’t hold it and, if I were to judge solely by her practice, I would be surprised if she does. Be that as it may: I’ll try to put my points by keeping philosophical assumptions down as much as ... (read more)
Tragedy and loss
Dear Editor,
In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hanse ... (read more)
Pam Macintyre
Top of my list is Sonya Hartnett’s bitter-sweet story of love and loss, The Ghost’s Child (Viking), for its emotional punch, mixture of realism, fairytale and magic realism, and exquisite prose. Also written with emotional clout is Bill Condon’s witty and frank Daredevils (UQP). Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin), by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow, gives sheer pleas ... (read more)
Endemic yowling
Dear Editor,
A footnote for Peter Craven. In 1935, the professor of English at the University of Melbourne, G.H. Cowling, declared that an Australian literature was virtually impossible. This enraged Australian writers everywhere, and provoked P.R. Stephensen’s classic The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936). It is also the only reason anyone remembers Cowling (‘Yowlin ... (read more)
Patronage and ABR
Private philanthropy has never been more important for the arts, as costs (and expectations) rise, and as traditional sources of funding and revenue become more unpredictable. ABR has had some success in this regard since entering the field two years ago, but June marks a turning point for us, with the formal launch of our philanthropy program in Melbourne, on 2 June. David Malo ... (read more)