Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks.

J.M. Coetzee has been knocked out of the Man Booker Prize. 

Lionel Shriver warned that inviting "a renowned iconoclast" to speak about community and belonging was "like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose".

Read this column and you can't unread it. Sounds reasonable, right? Which is another way of saying that doesn't sound unreasonable, unlike saying that's reasonably unsound, which is plausible too, given this paragraph's hall of mirrors.

Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton continue to delight readers at independent bookshops.

For the couple in Matthew Griffin's poignant, beautifully written debut, the closet remains the world.

Paul Mitchell is a terse and observant writer, as alive to the particulars of Aussie idiom and experience as Tim Winton, but less showy.

Robert Gott's actor and sometime detective thinks he's Laurence Olivier, though he's more often reduced to hamming it up as a pantomime dame.

Mark Baker is a former senior editor of The Age, editor of The Canberra Times and managing editor of Fairfax Media. He has been a foreign correspondent, covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was wounded while reporting the civil war on Bougainville in the early 1990s. His new biography is Phillip Schuler: the remarkable life of one of Australia's greatest war correspondents (Allen & Unwin).

There's shock, anger and confusion when the real world crosses with a beloved children's book.

This is the story of the man who gave his name to that river and the great dam that now controls it.

Although we're used to Elizabeth Gilbert's personal revelations – no one would have predicted what the 'Eat, Pray, Love' author's next chapter was going to be.

''I'm no great author'' insists radio comedian Andy Lee on his overnight success as a children's author.

Short stories

WILD ISLAND

Books are sharks, said the late Douglas Adams. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Comedian Andy Lee's children's book strikes a chord with adults and kids alike with its basic premise: Do Not Open This Book.

Stories written 80 years ago by F.Scott Fitzgerald will be published next April.

Andy Lee explained how the book, meant to be a one-off surprise for his sister, Alex Miles, ended up being a published work.

What's on in the Canberra literary scene.

Superheroes. Villains. Video games and movies. Stories about girls. Stories about adventures. Stories about kids like us. That's what Indigenous kids want to read.

There was more to the man than the angry hedonism of his youth.

Phosphene by Tamryn Bennett is the fourth volume in the Rabbit Poets Series

Canberra is a city of secrets. And when Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann first began writing their series of books back in 2011 they had a plan to reveal a few of them.