Progressive culture since 1954
‘Frankly, I don’t care how these people go to jail,’ Queensland Premier Campbell Newman declared. He was defending his attorney-general’s unprecedented attack on civil liberties, which was publicly announced last week and rushed through parliament in less than 24 hours.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the media’s treatment of Read’s death. Partly because as a crime writer I feel implicated by association in the media’s often-salacious interest in true crime, and it raises questions about aspects of what we, as writers of true or fictional crime, do and how we do it. It’s also interesting to ponder why Read became such a public figure and, by extension, why contemporary Australia is so fascinated with the criminal.
The only time I briefly met Norman Geras was at the Marxism 2000 conference, held in Amherst, Massachusetts. Geras was one of three keynote speakers. Angela Davis spoke on the prison-industrial complex, with typical charisma; Gayatri Spivak packed the hall and gave a paper that was interminable and incomprehensible (though to be fair, her work really only suits the printed page).
We received over 830 entries for the 2013 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers, many of which were of a remarkably high standard. After lengthy consideration, the judges have selected a shortlist of 12 exceptional stories.
There is something deeply absurd about competitions between artists, and yet they’ve existed for a very long time. We implicitly recognise their value. And the Booker is such a big prize. A big prize for a small country. We felt it. A sense of friendship for Eleanor but also of identification with that excessively simple idea, the New Zealand writer.