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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 STELLA PRIZE Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote? Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxi...

It’s 1978: the Auckland abortion clinic has been forced to close and sixteen-year-old Charlie has to fly to Sydney, but the plane is delayed on the tarmac.  It’s 2019: Charlie’s tightly contained Wellington life with her grandson Tommy is interrupted by the unexpected intrusions of Tommy’s first...

Wondering how migrants can fully settle on this ancient continent, Belinda Probert bought a property in the “country” to observe things more closely and learn to garden differently. At a time when many easy assumptions about how we live and how our society functions are being questioned there is ...

With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, The Sweetest Fruits illuminates three women’s tenacity and their struggles in a novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home and belonging.  In The Sweetest Fruits, three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, tell the stor...

The orthodoxy that increased defence spending will deliver increased national security confirms the status quo. But it does not help us to deal with shocks and surprises. How should Australia re-calibrate its national security settings to deal with global disruption?  Australia’s cultural and hi...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.  And To Ecstasy is a poetic journey through space and time, projecting a transcendental element of reality. In her exquisite poems, Marjon Mossammaparast explores the physical experience of being human, bound to four dimensions, matching it...

WINNER of the CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE 2022 In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. They are short, violent and strange, the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia. In 1942, another family, this time Polish, are nearly des...

A close-knit family is transformed forever when its matriarch tragically dies, leaving behind a husband, Timur the blacksmith, and their three young daughters. The Blacksmith’s Daughter follows the life of the eldest daughter, Gül, who is growing up in rural Turkey in the 1940s and ’50s. When Ti...

Opening a mysterious case of old photographs, Sharon Connolly begins a search for the great aunt she never knew. Gladys Shaw was a whistling comedian, a singer and saxophonist, an eccentric dancer and a whip-cracker — one of the ‘girls’ who made Australia laugh. They were onstage musical comics, ...

LONGLISTED IN THE WAVERLEY NIB AWARD 2022  On an East-African hunting expedition in 1909, Delia Akeley, a forty-year-old American woman, casually captured a baby female monkey, never dreaming this act would overturn both their lives. Delia’s life was isolated and often lonely in an overpoweringl...