Richard Neville, a co-founder and editor of the controversial counterculture magazine Oz, has died aged 74.

Whenever Henrietta went to the opera she shut her eyes to block out the lascivious throats, the heaving breasts, the strapping torsos. Meanwhile a night of Shakespeare enforced the same lass to clap her palms over her ears, lest she absorb an innuendo.

Pokemon joins the top 10

When she was young, Magda Szubanski used to read Enid Blyton and her father's old anatomy books. "I knew by the age of eight how to dissect a person," she told the Melbourne Writers Festival. "I performed it as a party trick."

Mascot Books threads the needle between the old world and new world of publishing.

Transition and transformation are key elements to all of Meg Rosoff's books. As are dogs.

If anyone was expecting a gentle trot through the whys and wherefores of writing, the pros and cons of great writers in Richard Flanagan's first public lecture as inaugural Boisbouvier Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne they were in for a surprise.

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.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

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.

The Australian National Dictionary begins with Abbott's booby (a gannet's cousin found on Christmas Island) and climaxes on zygomaturus (a bull-sized kangaroo from our megafauna days).

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.

Through caring for and loving the canine, the protagonist begins to heal.

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.

Nadja Spiegelman's intense, conflicting, highly fraught relationship with her mother and the centrality of mother-love is at the core of her memoir.

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.