You know I love travelling, but one continent I suspect I may never get to is Antarctica. It fascinates me, of course, but those cold temperatures are not as high on my list as many other places, and since I just finished a great novel set in Antarctica, I am doing a fairly good job of imagining it for myself anyway. That’s thanks to Robyn Mundy who wrote The Nature of Ice, and reminded me of another great novel about a modern Antarctic experience from one of all-time favourite writers, …

When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.
I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like …

I’m a fairly patriotic reader, for two reasons – firstly, I really think there is such great literature coming out of Australia, and secondly, because Australian authors are the ones I’m most likely to be able to see in the flesh. Make that Western Australian and I’m even more patriotic, so this post is a little like one big advertisement for West Aussie writer Craig Silvey.
First off, I should tell you the thing that bugs me the most about Silvey. He’s younger than me (by six years). And he’s already …