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Wordplay

<i>Illustration by John Shakespeare</i>

If he was struggling for a word, Charles Dickens would come up with a perfect new one to capture a crucial feeling or action.

A Dutch masterpiece

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It's hard to believe it has taken 70 years for Gerard Reve's The Evenings to reach the English-speaking world.

J.C. Burke

Author J.C. Burke: Her latest novel tackles the AIDS pandemic of the 1990s.

J.C. Burke never aspired to be a writer but says she finds it ''instinctive''. Her new young-adult novel is about the AIDS pandemic.

Revived by the King

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Parkes found the way to revive itself was to start an Elvis festival. This is the story of how it happened.

Portrait of Edward Cahill, pianist

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After his talent at the piano was spotted at an early age, Edward Cahill played for Dame Nelli Melba and she suggested a career in Europe.

Raised on tales of crime and redemption

Author Candice Fox in her Sydney home.

Last week, Candice Fox's fourth novel, Crimson Lake, was published and the week before the novel she wrote with James Patterson, Never Never, went straight into the New York Times bestseller list in top spot.

Ian McGuire

"It's a much more gritty, realistic, nasty version of the whaling industry than you get in Moby-Dick": Ian McGuire.

There's plenty of violence on Ian McGuire's Booker-longlisted novel The North Water, but it's all there to serve his purpose.

Life with Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks made it his life's work to convey what it was like to inhabit exceptional, radically different kinds of minds.

If you've ever wondered what it was like to get high with Oliver Sacks – and really, who hasn't? – the answer is: It was fun.