While it's been 20 years since we were first introduced to Harry Potter, the boy wizard still seems able to work his magic.

Australians Google the weather more than they Google sex.

In his new history, Sean McMeekin warns of the rise of Marxist-style socialism in the West.

Kim Scott will open the Melbourne Writers Festival with an address about our national identity.

There's something for fans of politics, crime and even some events for the kids.

New Shoots has commissioned 10 poets to respond to plants and places in the Royal Botanic Gardens for the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Morris West sold 70 million copies in his lifetime, now his family and Allen & Unwin have reissued his back catalogue.

Being Here, a short life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, is poetic and poignant.

Literary news and events in Canberra.

The Native American novelist and poet pays tribute to his late mother in his new memoir, acknowledging her as the source of his art.

Homelessness is one of the most complicated words with many meanings and few solutions.

It was reading Henry James' Washington Square that marked the moment when the novelist Rachel Seiffert became a ''grown-up'' reader.

Danielle Steel tops the Australian romance fiction charts with The Duchess.

The novelist Thea Astley's early poems and occasional offerings show she might have been a poet. Fay Zwicky, though, was one of the most formidable poets of her generation.

The stories in Jennifer Down's first collection have a youthful searching, yearning quality to them.

Bob Graham's prize-winning picture book Home in the Rain began as a smudge of pastel colour on a piece of copy paper. "It turned out to be a skyline of hills and then I put some dark cloud over it," he said.

Ben Bland speaks to student leaders, celebrity "super tutors", professionals, rich kids and banned artists in a quest to better understand the new cohort of young Hong Kongers.

Embedded in Anna Krien's essay The Long Goodbye is a compelling argument about the dire climate consequences of mining and the economic myths that sustain the industry.

The New Puberty addresses itself to adults, girls and boys, looking at the key physiological, emotional and mental stages both sexes experience, along with the cultural pressures.

Five of our favourite authors whet your appetite ahead of the Canberra Writers Festival.

She's run Women of Letters, written heaps of scripts and is the granddaughter of Frank Hardy. Now Marieke Hardy is to take over the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Jean Flynn's light as air novel is part chick-lit part romance novel.

Kelly Brooke Nicholls uses some her experience of working in Colombia in her novel about a family impacted by local drugs cartels.

In Frances Maynard's novel, Elvira is neuro-atypical. When her 72-year-old mother is felled by a stroke, she must learn to live independently.