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 [...]

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 [...]

Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters is part of a series of books – Why X Matters – published by Yale University Press, and based on a lecture series of the same name. The book is slim – compact. Three of the four chapters are based on lectures Grossman gave at Yale, while the fourth is [...]

Recently, I’ve been reading and thinking about Charlotte Wood’s novel The Submerged Cathedral. It’s not her most recent book, but I returned to it after finding a copy during one of those days when you’re trawling the bookshelf looking for something to inspire you: to remind you why you read, and write. Charlotte is a [...]