Melbourne crime writer Adrian McKinty has won a major gong in the US crime-writing awards, the Edgars.

Paula Hawkins' first novel, The Girl on the Train, sold more than 20 million copies around the world. So how does she follow that up? With a dark mystery of drowned women.

After after eight years of patience, obsession and digital breakthroughs the definitive guide to 900 species of Australian birds has been born.

The debut novel by Marija Pericic is about a spectacular Kafkaesque literary fraud.

Noted is a festival for anyone who loves to write

The Premier's Literary Awards shortlist flags a coming-of-age of shorter forms of storytelling.

One woman's journey of discovery took her back to the very place she wanted to escape from.

Robert Pirsig, whose 1974 travelogue-cum-philosophical tract, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, sold millions of copies and made him a reluctant hero to generations of intellectual wanderers, died at his home in South Berwick, Maine, on Monday. He was 88.

It has been more than 20 years since a study of Helen Garner's work so Bernadette Brennan's A Writing Life is welcome.

Pronouncing words the right way is important but it's far from an easy matter when it comes to the English language.

It is appropriate for Georgina Arnott to expose the lacunae and misprisions in Judith Wright's own representation of her past to suit her later beliefs.

Literary news and events

Nevo Zisin appeared as a 'case study' in a video for the now controversial Safe Schools program.

Ariel Levy's memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, asks what happens when you can no longer control how the story unfolds.

The best of these pieces are stories of deep pain and the role of animals in healing.

As in the best historical crime series, archival evidence provides the structure for a story that riffs on a history that is also poignantly personal.

Robert Newton's work as a firefighter has given him plenty to think about and include in his fiction for young readers.

I love The Odyssey for its episodic journeying structure, and its weirdness (especially when you compare it with The Iliad).

It is 50 years since Gabriel Garcia Marquez's hugely influential One Hundred Years of Solitude was published. We should give thanks for it.

Bennett's first novel, The Mothers, grew from its first skeletal draft of star-crossed lovers into a more complicated, nuanced tale of two motherless friends.

In this harrowingly revealing memoir, Nikki Gemmell is no bride stripped bare but a daughter naked in her grief after her mother took her own life.

It's a bit of a predictable rom-com but Anna Daniels' comic style makes the most of it.

In a saga about polar bears, Yoko Tawada has created a book about love and horror, nature and nurture and the role of writing.

English readers can delight in this prizewinning translation by Tess Lewis of Lutz Seiler's novel about the end of East Germany.