Susan Wyndham is The Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor. She has been a reporter, feature writer, Good Weekend editor and a Herald deputy editor. Her books include Life in His Hands: The True Story of a Neurosurgeon and a Pianist (2008) and My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent (2013).
Shirley Hazzard was one of the most cosmopolitan, elegant and quietly formidable writers of the 20th century, claimed by Australians and New Yorkers – and some Italians – as one of their own. Born in Sydney, a US citizen since the 1970s, she died at the age of 85 in her Manhattan apartment on Monday night.
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.
What do you get when you throw a novelist into a group of biologists?
A sunny new edition of Stasiland; why girls have taken over book titles.
The new artistic director of the Sydney Writers' Festival, Michaela McGuire, represents a younger generation of event curators in Australia with an impressive range of experience.
The reclusive Italian writer Elena Ferrante may never publish another book following a journalist's apparent exposure of her real identity, warns her American translator.
The author hopes she won't regret the risk she took in writing her latest memoir.
Even grown-ups want to believe in fairytales, as a journalist found when public outrage greeted his "unmasking" of the best-selling Italian novelist Elena Ferrante this week.
Writers' festival season is well underway wherever you may be in the country with the inaugural Canberra Writers Festival on this weekend (canberrawritersfestival.com.au) and Melbourne Writers Festival (mwf.org.au) sprawling over this weekend and next. Closer to home, Sydney Jewish Writers Festival opens on Saturday evening at Bondi Pavilion, continues all day Sunday at Waverley Library, with a final session on stress-free parenting with Shelley Davidow on Monday morning (sjwf.org.au). I will be part of the launch of Rebellious Daughters, an anthology of memoirs by Australian women, along with editors Maria Katsonis and Lee Kofman, and another contributor, Leah Kaminsky, who will also join me with Steven Amsterdam and Rabbi David Freeman in a session called "We Need to Talk about Dying". Other speakers include David Gonski, Arnold Zable, Mireille Juchau, and in the children's program Anna and Barbara Feinberg, the mother and daughter who for 20 years have created the popular Tashi books.
On the morning I meet the artist and writer Kim Mahood, she has driven her ute nonstop for 1000 kilometres on her way home to Canberra from the Tanami Desert in Western Australia, a journey she has made back and forth across the continent for more than 20 years with the compulsion of a migrating bird.
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