Keywords: Writer
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 28 April 2023
2 Comments
While our lives plod along in an ordinary groove, the great writers astound us and lift us on to another plane. The state of reading, Dessaix believes, is one of intense attention: in every true reading of literature in adult life, we revert to that early attitude of plasticity and innocence before the text.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Mitchell
- 13 April 2023
Prisons are settings to which TV and film writers return regularly. It’s because ‘the joint’ gives them an environment in which they can enact the dramatic principle of the crucible easily: tension between duelling inmate protagonists and antagonists is heightened quickly to boiling point because no one can simply walk away.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Paul Mitchell
- 17 February 2023
3 Comments
Arguably Australia’s most celebrated living author, Helen Garner has built a reputation as a fearless and unapologetic writer whose work has remained fresh and relevant for over 45 years. We sat down with Helen to explore the challenges of confessional non-fiction, her fondness for church, and her commitment to unsparing self-analysis.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Kate Moriarty
- 07 February 2023
2 Comments
Do you get imposter thoughts? Do you have an inner critic who has nasty things to say whenever you set out to create? You're not alone. If you are looking for a fun activity that will bring you into constant confrontation with your inner critic, write a novel. I did, and here’s what I learnt along the way.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 17 November 2022
2 Comments
Paulie had a childlike delight in taking the mickey out of everything and everyone and acting outrageously. The stories of the Painters and Dockers’ engagement with their equally wild audiences and the public, full of hilarious encounters, display the same innocence and the same sublimated rage. If it was his brother Tony’s death that set him on his madcap journey, Paulie has shaped his own life as a monument for Tony more durable than marble.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Andrew Hamilton
- 11 November 2022
3 Comments
In Justice in Kelly Country, author Lachlan Strahan writes on the life of his great-great-grandfather, a policeman whose career stretched over thirty years. When a significant part of that story is intermeshed with such a fiercely contested story as Ned Kelly’s, telling it introduces the further complexities of the writer’s sympathies and judgments.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Emma Wilkins
- 27 September 2022
2 Comments
There's an assumption that writers shouldn’t be writing about groups they don't belong to, as if this couldn’t be done with honesty and insight, respect and restraint. Difficult, yes, but impossible? Whether in fiction or non-fiction, outsiders might misunderstand and misrepresent the people they depict, but sometimes, insiders will too. Sometimes, outsiders will lack insight, but sometimes, when they’re curious, attentive, when they do not overreach, they’ll capture truth.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Michael McGirr
- 25 August 2022
4 Comments
Salman Rushdie is a writer with a most defiant sense of humour. If you want to get to know him, I wouldn’t start with The Satanic Verses (1988), the book that has brought him so much grief. Thirty three years after Ayatollah Khomeni imposed a fatwa on the author, it would seem to have led, on August 12, to a young man called Hadi Matar making an attempt on Rushdie’s life at a public event in New York.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 16 June 2022
9 Comments
Writers are not only preoccupied, among other things, with the concept of place, but also with the matter of time and its passing. Novelist L.P. Hartley famously wrote that the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Cretan Nikos Kazantzakis considered that ‘the face of Greece is a palimpsest bearing twelve successive inscriptions,’ and he went on to list them, from the 1930s, when he wrote these words, to the Stone Age.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Gillian Bouras
- 04 November 2021
14 Comments
Writers inevitably learn bitter lessons, including one about readers who will be wounded, hurt, or at least deeply offended by their work. There is usually more than one group of these, for people become upset for reasons that are many and varied. Such is the case in the reaction to Jeanine Cummins’ fourth book, American Dirt. Cummins has been variously accused of stereotyping, racism, narcissism, and of lacking in empathy.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Joel Hodge
- 05 October 2021
63 Comments
Does life have meaning? Or, as the new nihilists suggest, is life meaningless? A new book, The Sunny Nihilist, by writer and journalist, Wendy Syfret, puts the case for nihilism as an antidote to the obsessive search for meaning and purpose that many modern people experience.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Sarah Klenbort
- 01 July 2021
53 Comments
While we can’t conflate accusations against Roth’s biographer with his subject, this recent Blake Bailey scandal invites us to revisit, through a 21st century lens, the world of someone considered one of the definitive writers of the 20th century.
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