The Melbourne memoirist, poet and now children's author Maxine Beneba Clarke has racked up two shortlistings in the VPL awards.

Is it a bar or is it a bookshop, that is the question? Eamonn Hennessy is combining the two in his new venture.

A small publisher's decision to stop entering its books for awards has revealed how expensive and cumbersome the prize system is – and that most prizes don't boost book sales.

We asked a number of Australian writers to nominate their best reading experiences of the past year.

We will never see the like of this book again; leaders no longer have the patience, passion or attention.

What do you get when you throw a novelist into a group of biologists?

Literary news and events in Canberra.

Not a biography of Victor Trumper but "an iconography, a study of Trumper's valence in cricket's mythology and imagery".

These two biographies seek to bring their subjects out of the shadows cast by their respective husbands.

Gary Chance is an amoral criminal in a murky moral world but when a job goes wrong he is forced to make radical decisions.

Graeme Davison's almost compassionate understanding of a callow colonial country struggling to establish its own identity traces its flowering into a confident global destination.

When it comes to creating worlds for the reader to relish, it's hard to go past one based on the writer's imagination rather than reality.

J.K. Rowling tops the children's best-sellers' list again

Commonwealth writers have no chance of beating US 'big hitters', 2011 winner Julian Barnes claims.

Meg McKinlay is a children's writer and poet who lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. Her novel A Single Stone (Walker Books), about a 14-year-old girl who lives in a mountain village where small children work in the mines, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction.

In his book Conclave, Robert Harris takes the reader into the Sistine Chapel as 118 old men in robes vote for a new pope.

J.K. Rowling's script for the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has gone straight to the top of the bestseller list on publication.

Patrick Leigh Fermor's letters reveal both a first-rate writer and a paradoxical person.

Chris Rogers became a fixture in the Australian cricket team at the relatively advanced age of 36.

Sally Faulkner's account of her attempt to rescue her children from Beirut is sad and full of tension.

When Cindy marries a charming Australian on impulse and is carried off to a dusty sheep station in New South Wales she gets more than she bargained for.

Diana Gabaldon revisits her time-travelling Scottish hero, Jamie Fraser - in his youth

Alan Watson focuses on two speeches to argue that Churchill's contribution after the war was as significant as during it.

Brian Evenson's stories show he has an original imagination and a strong stomach.