From a look at the 1980s in Australia to a political fable about a young woman with a locust embedded in her head.

Life of Pi author Yann Martel has a message for the powerful people of Canberra – reading books is important.

Is romantic fiction finally getting the attention it deserves?

The Mandibles is Lionel Shriver's new book. Will it be as widely successful as We Need to Talk About Kevin, the book that made her rich and famous? It certainly has all the controversial elements.

Writers' festival season is well underway wherever you may be in the country with the inaugural Canberra Writers Festival on this weekend (canberrawritersfestival.com.au) and Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.org.au) sprawling over this weekend and next. Closer to home, Sydney Jewish Writers Festival opens on Saturday evening at Bondi Pavilion, continues all day Sunday at Waverley Library, with a final session on stress-free parenting with Shelley Davidow on Monday morning (sjwf.org.au). I will be part of the launch of Rebellious Daughters, an anthology of memoirs by Australian women, along with editors Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, and another contributor, Leah Kaminsky, who will also join me with Steven Amsterdam and Rabbi David Freeman in a session called "We Need to Talk about Dying". Other speakers include David Gonski, Arnold Zable, Mireille Juchau, and in the children's program Anna and Barbara Feinberg, the mother and daughter who for 20 years have created the popular Tashi books.

Two new Australian crime novels share a nuanced understanding of how quite ordinary extraordinary people may find themselves up to their necks in trouble.

Jousting is not an Olympic sport. Well, not yet. But Tokyo 2020 could prove a different barrel of monkeys.

A good thriller should thrill the reader and make them want to turn the pages to find out what happens next.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

A major American poetry magazine has turned its sights on Australia, with mixed results.

A major strength is the author's use of early stories of travel and conquest.

The latest Treehouse adventures from Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton have swiftly knocked the middle-aged boy wizard, Harry Potter, from the top of the bestseller lists

China Mieville imagines a Paris of 1950 in which manifestations or "manifs" from Surrealist art have leapt from the paintings to the streets.

The hero of Emma Chapman's novel is a war photographer whose childhood trauma encourages him to distance himself from his subject matter.

Humour, weirdness, and social critique characterise almost all of the stories in Julie Koh's Portable Curiosities.

This is Caroline Beecham's first novel, but it is so well structured and fictionalises its fascinating historical sources so successfully that it reads like the work of a veteran storyteller.

The cumulative effect of these stories of the Gurindji people is of a slowly unfolding tragedy that ends in defiant revolt.

Norway has shownhow to successfully manage the wealth from natural resources without being exploited by multi-nationals or squandering the windfall.

What emerges most strongly from this portrait is the chameleon quality of both the man and his music.

For all the positive developments in women's sport, the fact remains that organised sport is "a bastion of male chauvinism".

Gretchen Shirm is a writer and lawyer. She has been published in The Best Australian Stories, Etchings, Wet Ink, and Southerly. She was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists for her collection, Having Cried Wolf. Her new novel, Where the Light Falls (Allen & Unwin), follows a photographer's efforts to understand his former girlfriend's death.

Canberra author Stephanie Owen Reeder has won a major prize at the Children's Book Council of Australia awards for her retelling of the true story of Lennie Gwyther.

When Australian thriller writer LA (Louise) Larkin heard of a British expedition to Antarctica where a team of scientists were planning to drill 3km down into a subglacial lake that had been isolated for half a million years, the first question she asked herself was what if.

Candice Fox cornered best-selling author James Patterson at a cocktail party and next thing she knew they were writing a book.