Here’s a little snippet from Richard Glover’s column in the weekend paper, which made me smile: Bring back the typewriter It was difficult to write a long novel using a typewriter. You’d have to pound away in a fog of Tipp-Ex and carbon fumes. Occasionally people like Dylan Thomas would write something really good and [...]

For the past several years, I have had the honour of being one of the judges of Emerging Author Category of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Judging this award is always exciting and challenging, calling on each of us to reconsider – each year – what it is the award should be looking for in [...]

Outside my office there is a beautiful, distracting swathe of native bushland. I’ve had many visitors in my office, most of them human, but occasionally some creature wanders in. A glorious green tree snake spent a few days curled up between the window and the screens, rock wallabies and koalas peer in, and every now [...]

Asked to consider the role of the writer, Mr. Lopez has said: I like to use the word isumatug. It’s of eastern Arctic Eskimo dialect and refers to the storyteller, meaning ‘the person who creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself.’ I think that’s the writer’s job. It’s not to be brilliant, or to [...]

I’ve been reading a wonderful book of poetry by the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg: The Lamplit Answer. This collection was first published in 1982, and later included as part of the collection, Supernatural Love . I discovered it when a friend advised that it included a series of poems on Simone Weil. It’s a slim [...]

[this article - or, at least, some version of it, originally appeared in WQ] Every morning when I slide out of bed I put on coffee and open my notebooks, sit down at my desk, and write. It seems simple enough and, to a disinterested observer – to the birds outside my window – perhaps [...]

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not — this is [...]