The Washington Post

Senators Pauline Hanson and Derryn Hinch have emerged as pivotal figures in the Australian book industry's campaign to scuttle calls by the Productivity Commission to scrap certain copyright restrictions affecting Australian authors and publishers.

Eighty years ago JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis dared each other to write a sci-fi novel. It was a challenge that would lead to the creation of The Lord of the Rings.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

Celebrities were not the only ones sucked in when Laura Albert wrote as an abused young man.

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If you're anything like the typical Australian, you probably break the copyright law 80 times a day, according figures included in the Productivity Commission's final report to the government on intellectual property.

Stan Grant believes in the greatness of Australia as a peaceful, cohesive, prosperous society even as he recognises its history of neglect and bigotry

Hannah Kent's new historical novel set in 19th-century Ireland and plunging the reader into a world of tradition and superstition is number one in independent bookshops.

Fly an hour any way in India and you'll land in a city with a different culture and language from where you have just left. It is heaven for the word lover, but there are traps to be avoided.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a refugee from the Vietnam War, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction this year for The Sympathizer, which tackles America's intervention.

Reading Petina Gappah's suite of short stories set in Zimbabwe is an intoxicating experience.

For the 21st Jack Reacher novel Lee Child has taken us back to his earlier days as an intelligence operative in Afghanistan.

Lady Jane Grey begged not to be anointed queen but the forces of history were turning and she was doomed.

In Cove, Cynan Jones sets himself the task of writing prose of absolute compression for his stark novel of surviving the elements.

The love letters of writers of all sorts tell us much about their feelings unmediated by a book or a poem.

Josephine Wilson's Extinctions is a story full of death, yet held together by subtle, lyrical prose that refuses to give way to despair.

There are 1600 inscriptions, each a case-study amounting to a broader cross-section of Australian immigration over two centuries.

Can Dash rescue the spirit of Christmas in his girlfriend Lily, who keeps disappearing into the Manhattan night?

Scurvy deeply affected the senses and perceptions: especially of explorers in first contact with the otherness of the New World.

Rachael Treasure is the author of rural fiction bestsellers including Jillaroo, The Stockman and The Cattleman's Daughter.

Trevor Noah's memoir is told in a voice that is tuned to the sheer dramatic absurdity of events and laws in South Africa.

Jaye Chin-Dusting spent 30 years doing medical research but wanted something else to do. So she bought a bookshop.

Each year there is a collection of annuals that gives us what the editors consider the best in a certain form of writing. This year, the best seem better than ever.

The Mare covers a period of three or four years in the enmeshed lives of a young girl, Velvet, and 47-year-old Ginger as they love/hate, court/detest each other.