Australia's most significant literary award, the Miles Franklin, will be presented early in September. Here the five shortlisted authors offer insights into the writing of their novels.

Former special forces soldier Bram Connolly will talk all things military.

Revolution is the theme for this year's Melbourne Writers Festival. A whirlpool of discussion about protest, oppression and war will dominate the stage but the program also promises ideas for change and new directions.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

Kim Scott's latest novel, Taboo, is ambitious, unsentimental, untidy, challenging and very fine.

Two stellar ABC journalists have written their first books of crime fiction and they don't disappoint.

• David Astle

The modern resilience myth is founded on a bounce-back rhetoric, as if humans are squash balls, and adversity doesn't leave its traces.

Georgia Blain died 13 months after being diagnosed with a brain tumour, In those months, she wrote almost continuously and her final book, The Museum of Words, will be published later this month.

In the course of his entertaining series of autobiographical sketches, Andrew Ford tells us how music replaced religion in his life – "what I thought was God now I think was Beethoven".

It was Dava Sobel's delicate depiction of obsession, Longitude, that encouraged Michael Pryor to start reading non-fiction again.

Minecraft is one of the most successful video games in the world. Now there is Minecraft: The Novel - who would have believed it possible?

With more than 100 authors across eight iconic locations, we've narrowed down the best of the Canberra Writers Festival

Top 10 Bestsellers

It's possible to see the influence of Gerald Murnane on Shaun Prescott's The Town, in its style and in its focus on the strangeness of banality.

The Mountain of Light is perhaps the most famous diamond in the world and its story involves the machinations of the Moghuls, Persians, Sikhs and British.

Sarah Winman's themes in Tin Man are the intensity and reality of youthful friendships and the emotional dynamics of sexuality.

Niccolo Ammaniti's visions of a post-apocalyptic landscape are written with gusto and imagination, and the young heroine is an endearing figure.

A lot of women will find their own experiences mirrored in Unbreakable. But this is also a book for men.

It took Michael Frank half a lifetime to make sense of the powerplay within his extended family and the toll it took.

There's a knowing, accepting openness about sex in And Watch the Whale Explode that takes it seriously without being stodgy.

The stories Mark Abernethy tells are crying out to be turned into gritty television drama.

What do we all talk about incessantly? The weather. Lawrie Zion gets to grips with our obsession with it.

Injury Time is a worthy successor to Clive James' Sentenced to Life, and covers much of the same ground, albeit with greater bemusement at his unexpected survival.

By 1888, when the centenary of the First Fleet's arrival was celebrated, Victoria was far and away the leading Australian colony and Marvellous Melbourne a world-class metropolis. Thirty-two-year-old Alfred Deakin was chief secretary, a political wunderkind who had been a member of parliament for almost a decade. Ned Kelly was already dead, hanged on November 11, 1880 for murdering a policeman. Deakin saw the hanging, most likely as a reporter for The Age, one of the 50 men allowed inside the Melbourne Gaol to witness the drop.