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.

As the world prepares to celebrate the centenary of Roal Dahl's birth, the life of one of the world's greatest storytellers proves to be full of intrigue and untruth.

This week's Top 10 Children's books.

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.

• COMMENT

Cooperation between copyright owners, libraries and educational institutions has a sensible draft bill to the point where it is ready to go to Parliament.

Freeman's is not a literary journal per se; instead each edition is a standard book-format collection of international literary writing – a "best of" according to the editor.

It used to be that the heroes of traditional children's books series were essentially ageless, no matter how many adventures they got through.

The Canberra Writers' Festival is on from August 26 to 28, 2016.  

Philippe Sands has produced a brilliant narrative, elegantly weaving together stories of public and private importance, with a cast of characters that vary from the flawed, the cruel to the compassionate.