Man Booker-winning novelist begins the public element of his role as Boisbouvier professor of Australian literature at the University of Melbourne on Thursday with a lecture at Melbourne Writers Festival.

The Girls' star is writing her first fiction book.

Peter Mares' essential new book, Not Quite Australian, is a cogent analysis of the shifts in migration policy that have occurred in Australia in the 21st century.

Fingernail scratch marks on the hull of a sunken boat gave a chilling clue to the battle to stay alive before 14 local football players drowned off Mornington in 1892.

There are no good books, says American writer Lev Grossman - an unnerving opinion from a successful author of five novels who also spends much of his working life assessing other writers' books as critic for Time magazine.

Writers at the first weekend of the Melbourne Writers Festival talked about the many paths and experiences that had led to the creation of their books.

The latest instalment of Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton Treehouse books is delighting young readers around the country.

The Stars Askew plunges into the political chaos unleashed in Rjurik Davidson's Unwrapped Sky.

Peter Thomson remains a national icon, and while Tony Walker sketches in the biographical background, his book focuses on those five British Opens.

Kathryn Spurling highlights the trail of incompetence, presumption and outmoded radio communications that led to disaster.

Each of Ed O'Loughlin's protagonists has a connection to enigmas of the ice, and the novel opens out into a slew of historical figures.

As Literacy and Numeracy Week approaches, a program is under way in Canberra to boost literacy levels in children long before they begin school.

This is a story of how the internet sometimes makes dreams come wildly true.

A.S. Patric has won Australia's premier literary prize for his novel about refugees from Bosnia dealing with their trauma as they struggle to create new lives for themselves in Melbourne.

The volume offers glimpses of strong women – every one of whom subverts orientalist cliché in some way – through sensual and compressed prose.

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

Laurence Leamer's study is a catalogue of psychopathic sadists and dysfunctional families venting their spleen through the Klan.

Emma Viskic's debut novel, Resurrection Bay, has picked up four crime-writing awards in a weekend of triumph for the Melbourne writer.

In Heiss' novel, one prisoner remains at large. His unexpected but fortunate fate is to find himself protected within the Erambie Aboriginal Mission.

Ecodisaster isn't the only thing going on in Briohny Doyle's debut novel, but it's an environmentally fraught future all the same.

Selection Day has striking parallels with Christos Tsiolkias' Barracuda, in which a teenager groomed as a potential Olympic swimmer has to confront failure, class conflict and homoerotic feelings.

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

In 1908, archaeologist Luigi Pernier was poking around the ruins of an ancient palace in Crete when he unearthed a smallish clay disc that featured a series of mysterious symbols set in a spiral on both sides.

Is romantic fiction finally getting the attention it deserves?