Strong showing by three independent publishers in Australia's premier literary award longlist.

Award-winning playwright and former Labor speechwriter's passing prompts widespread tributes.

I loved John Irving's characters, his frankness, and the way he wove short stories and chapters of books "written" by Garp into his narrative.

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

Julie Buntin's coming-of-age debut novel is a thoughtful treatment of various themes – friendship, motherhood and the failed urge of the American Dream.

Michele Roberts uses two narratives 160 years apart to create a beautifully structured ghost story and tale of women's lives.

Anita Shreve's account of bush fires is terrifying, and her portrait of a bad marriage almost equally so.

Tamara McKinley uses the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries as a meta-historical background for her historical novel, set in 1905.

You don't have to have been awarded a gigantic international literary prize to make a winning acceptance speech.

Paula Keogh and poet Michael Dransfield were in their mid-twenties when they met in a psychiatric ward and fell in love. Half a lifetime later, Keogh writes of this dark and ecstatic time.

Sven Brinkmann offers his own contrarian seven steps, inspired by the ancient Stoics, to help you resist the fetishisation of the self.

In the spirit of the absurdist and playful logic that characterises Lewis Carroll's Alice books, A Chink in a Daisy-Chain takes us into the rabbit warren of Phil Day's mind.

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.