News
Book reviewing
Mon 31 Mar 2014
I’m currently reading my way through a couple of novels for review purposes Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn was sent to me by The Saturday Paper. It’s a broad comic farce set in the British literary world. It revolves around competition for the prestigous Elysian Prize (standing in, I assume, for the Booker). I’m …read more »
Merricks Yacht Club
Tue 12 Nov 2013
One of the villians in my novel ‘Stiff’ is named Lionel Merricks. By way of an unrelated fact, Merricks also the name of a little village on Westernport Bay, about 90 minutes from Melbourne. For reasons I still do not fully comprehend, I was recently invited to make a speech at the coronation of the …read more »
Melbourne Festival, que?
Tue 12 Nov 2013
Along with Malcolm Knox, Amanda Lohrey, Melissa Lucashenko and Chloe Hooper, I recently attended a number of Melbourne Festival events for a project of the Wheeler Centre called ‘Criticism Now’. The idea being to have non-‘professionals’ write personal responses to specific music, theatre and visual arts events in the festival program. The results will soon …read more »
Body in the Garden Festival 26-27 October
Tue 12 Nov 2013
Adelaide is, well, different. Where else would you find a free festival combining gardening and crime writing, staged amid the fronds of the Botanic Gardens on a blue-skied weekend when unidentified human remains are found in the fireplace of a South Australian farmhouse? I missed the Ned Kelly Awards this year on account of their …read more »
Crime Writers Association gets cracking
Wed 31 Jul 2013
The Australian Crime Writers Association now has a website. Take a look and find out about this year’s Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing which will be presented this year at the Brisbane Writers Festival To get crime-loving readers fired up for the occasion, Allen & Unwin are publishing If I Tell You I’ll Have to Kill …read more »
Geoffrey Rush narrates Encounters – now on television
Wed 31 Jul 2013
‘Australian Encounters’ is a series of historical sketches which have appeared in every issue of the The Monthly magazine since November 2005. I write the words, Chris Grosz does the illustration. Our collaboration has now moved to the small screeen in the form of three-minuted animated shorts which are now appearing immediately before the 7pm news on ABC …read more »
Boiled heads and Byron bound
Tue 24 Jul 2012
Peter Booth’s enigmatic paintings have long intrigued me. His most recent show features a number of these remarkable boiled heads – they look like psychological portraits of the leading lights of the NSW Right I’m just back from a brief foray into the Brazils – Rio and Salvador da Bahia – observing the local customs …read more »
‘Stiff’ goes classical
Sun 10 Jun 2012
When my first novel ‘Stiff’ was published in 1994, I had no idea of what would follow. Becoming a published novelist was an end in itself – the pinnacle of my ambitions. I hadn’t really given much thought to what next. I certainly had no grand scheme up my sleeve. I simply crossed my fingers …read more »
Goodbye Di
Fri 07 Oct 2011
Di Gribble died this week. She was a great soul. I cannot believe she is gone.