The latest winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript award hopes to follow in the footsteps of his successful predecessors.

It doesn't take much to provoke US President Donald Trump into blocking a follower on Twitter - anything from an insult to an unflattering gif to a mild "covfefe" joke seems enough to do the trick.

In the post-literate world of the Oval Office, language is the new chew toy.

Tracy Chvalier's Othello is set in a Washington DC school in the mid-1970s: Othello is a Ghanaian boy called Osei; Desdemona becomes Dee, who dares befriend him; and Ian is the bully who seeks to destroy their love.

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour, John Curtin's "call to America", and the fall of Singapore finally convinced us that as well as needing to maintain allies, we should be engaging with Asia.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a novel of aftermath and of the reparative and connective tissue of the loyalty, love and kindness that abut torture, betrayal and despair.

The Cows is clever, lively and accessible, mostly a romp, but it addresses the lives of contemporary women.

Since We Fell is quite unlike anything Dennis Lehane has written before - a psychological thriller with a female protagonist.

Defying predictions of doom for the printed word, it seems Australians have a surprisingly strong habit of reading books.

It's the counter-intuitive findings that make Sam Walker's The Captain Class so fascinating and insightful.

Divided We Stand is the account of the struggle between left and right over women's rights and family values in the US that still rages today.

Cassandra Wigheard of the US Army, not quite yet out of her teens, is fighting in Iraq in 2003. When she and two fellow soldiers find themselves under fire, all three are taken prisoner.

James Runcie's hero, Sidney Chambers, combines his priestly status with a gift for amateur detection to become a kind of latter-day Father Brown.

For all the daily cruelties she was subject to, Maude Julien's memoir of life with her dictatorial father is never self-pitying.

Anyone familiar with Richard Ford's fiction will know he's an author for whom "keeping it real" is a sacred tenet. So he says he won't inflate his parents' lives in his memoir, Between Them.

The letters between Wayne Flynt and Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, show she was warm, chatty and self-deprecating.

This compelling, well-researched and finely written book focuses on the Sydney underworld from 1966 to 1972. Good times to be a crim, apparently.

This debut novel by a writer not yet out of her 20s is a brave attempt to come to grips with an intractable state.

Despite some uphill struggles in life, this writer's work is surprisingly upbeat, feisty and funny.

Steve Toltz was a child when he first started writing funny stories.

Literary news and events in Canberra

John Grisham collects first editions of great books and that hobby is at the core of his new novel.

The importance of a good metaphor should never be underestimated.

John Kinsella is one of the finest and most versatile of Australian authors – poet, editor, critic, author of fiction besides being a principled champion of ecological causes