Ann Patchett, Tom Lake (#BookReview)

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I have not read Ann Patchett for a long time. In fact, I’ve only read one novel, Bel Canto, way before blogging, and one nonfiction piece, “The bookshop strikes back” (my review). So, when I saw all the love her latest novel, Tom Lake, was getting in 2023’s end-of-year lists (including Kate‘s annual compilation), I thought it might be time to read her again, and added it my reading group’s suggestions list. With others having read and enjoyed various of her books, we reached consensus and scheduled it for March.

For those who haven’t caught up with it, Tom Lake is set on a family cherry orchard in Michigan during the COVID pandemic. It is a dual timeline story in which the narrator, 57-year-old Lara, tells her three twenty-something daughters, about her past, specifically about the summer she played Emily in Thornton Wilder’s classic play, Our town, and the romance she had with Duke, a co-actor who later became a huge star. Lara was just 24-years-old, and these were the golden days of youth when all seemed possible. As we flip between past and present, while the family picks the sweet cherries and the tart, feelings are explored and insights about life, love, and the decisions we make are revealed and turned over. The girls come to know their parents better, and see perhaps why fame is not necessarily all it appears, while Lara gets the monkey of her past off her back. This does not mean Tom Lake is one of those angsty books about the past coming back to haunt you. It’s a quieter, more subtle story about children’s fascination with their parents’ pasts, and what parents choose to tell – and when. It is also about the way in which revisiting the past can bring new insights (just as re-reading a great novel can produce new thoughts and ideas). Lara thinks, near the end:

“The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant.” (Ch. 18)

All this would normally appeal to me, and I did enjoy reading the novel. I was fascinated by the whole summer stock theatre business because it has frequently popped up in my reading and viewing over the years. And, I loved her characterisation. The differentiation of the three sisters – Emily, Maisie and Nell – and Lara’s understanding of their separate personalities was well done and engaged me from the start.

This is not surprising. Tom Lake is Patchett’s 9th novel, so she knows how to construct and tell a story. Her metier seems to be interpersonal relationships within small groups of people. This novel’s focus is two such groups – the Tom Lake theatre group in 1988 and the family on the farm in 2020. These groups are well characterised. You feel you are there rehearsing in the theatre or swimming in the lake, or at the farm chatting over dinner or picking cherries. The voyeur in me loves being in places outside my experience, so I loved these beautifully depicted places.

But, it is a quiet novel and, as much as I enjoyed the read, I also found it somewhat unsatisfying. It’s not that it was completely predictable because, although we know from the start where Lara ended up, the journey does have some interest. It’s more that it’s a sweet, warm-hearted story, while I like a bit more edge or bite in my reading, a bit more meat.

And, there was potential for meat. Tom Lake is an intergenerational story which explores that mystery between children and their parents’ lives. It reminded me how my brother and I learnt things that surprised us about our parents’ courtship right in the last months of their lives. This story is a bit about that, about how, when and what you tell your children and why. When Lara’s husband Joe had, sometime in the past, inadvertently let drop that Lara had dated the now celebrity actor Duke, he is surprised by how much the children care. So, with the family isolated together due to the pandemic, Lara embarks on telling her story, “knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them”. This is warmly and skilfully done, so that by the end the girls accept the story they are given.

The interactions reveal other intergenerational issues too. The girls challenge Lara when she uses what is to them “politically incorrect” language. When she introduces her understudy, Pallace, who is also a dancer, Lara describes her “preposterous” legs, but is quickly criticised for “objectifying” her. And, when she describes Duke’s “craziness”, she is interrupted again and told she can’t use words like “crazy” or “nuts” or “insane”. They’re “pejorative”. She should only use his “diagnosis” and only if he didn’t mind. She should just say “what happened … Just the facts, without attaching any judgment to it”. These are gorgeous interactions that mirror the sort of conversations many of us are having as we navigate modern sensibilities. Patchett handles them with grace and generosity – not to mention a lovely touch of humour.

Indeed, one of the book’s strengths is the learning between generations, and the gentle wisdom imparted. When the girls jump onto an event involving Duke, calling it “the happiest day” in her life, Lara reminds them that it was “not by a long shot”. It was simply “the happiest day of the summer of 1988”.

So far so good … I can see why people (including me) enjoyed it. It is warm-hearted, and nicely reflective about youth and the perspectives of age. But, it also disappointed. Tom Lake crosses some genres that interest me – pandemic literature, farm literature, climate change literature (cli-fi), coming of age stories, and the sliding-door trope, and I wanted these explored more. I wanted her to tackle the questions left hanging, such as climate change and Emily’s decision not to have children.

However, Tom Lake is not that book, and I shouldn’t expect it to be, so I won’t. But, even without that, it just felt a bit saccharine (including the farm cemetery with its “benevolent” shade), a little too neatly tied up. Difficulties are hinted at, but in the end the sweet cherries win out over the tart. I, though, like my desserts just that little bit tart.

Ann Patchett
Tom Lake
London: Bloomsbury, 2023
310pp.
ISBN: 9781526664235 (eBook)

Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction (2)

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I said in last week’s Monday Musing, which was dedicated Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) 1961 “Year Club”, that I might write a second post this week. I know the week finished yesterday, 19 April, but I couldn’t resist posting on a topic that popped up frequently during my research, the Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF).

Brief history

The Commonwealth Literary Fund (see Wikipedia) was created in 1908 to assist needy writers and their families (primarily by providing small incomes to writers needing support, and to widows and dependent families of writers who died destitute). After 1939, it was broadened to grant fellowships, provide guarantees against loss to Australian publishers, and assist Australian literary magazines (Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant and Southerly). In 1973, its functions were taken over by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (renamed the Australia Council in 1975, and Creative Australia in 2023). Of course, these renamings involve structural and policy changes but these are not my interest here.

However, I will explain that in 1939, the Committee which made the decisions was replaced by a Parliamentary Committee, which comprised the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and one other. In practice, their Advisory board, which comprised leading writers, publishers and academics made the decisions – except when they were over-ridden.

Controversy

You won’t be surprised to hear that as an arts funding body, the CLF was involved, directly and indirectly, in controversy – in 1961 (and probably many other years if I went looking). I will share a couple from this year.

The politics of arts funding (1)

One related to the above-mentioned support for those four literary magazines. The Communist Party’s newspaper Tribune (21 June) reported that conservative PM Menzies had rejected the Advisory Board’s recommendation that Overland, a leftist magazine, should receive a grant, while he had “no objection” to a grant going to Quadrant, a conservative magazine which Tribune says has ‘infinitesimal claims to being a “literary” journal, but is renowned for the savagely reactionary nature of its political views’. They quote Katharine Susannah Prichard, Nancy Cato and Kylie Tenant as criticising this decision, with Tennant saying

We now know that the Commonwealth Literary Fund is only there to support the most anaemic and harmless publications.

Mary Gilmore, 1927 (Public Domain, State Library of QLD, via Wikipedia)

Tribune says it has criticised Overland at times for not supporting “with sufficient firmness and vehemence … the labor movement, whose energy and initiative originally launched it”. In fact, Overland had often sought ‘to take a “neutral” stand in the sharp issues of our day’. Unfortunately, ‘its attempts at “neutrality” have not saved it from the reactionary hand of Menzies’!

A few days later, poet and utopian socialist Mary Gilmore, criticised the decision in Tribune (5 July), and concluded with:

Might I suggest that, having been established by a Labor Prime Minister for the benefit of Australian writers, the unions remember this? For without such publications Australia would be a dumb continent except for book publication here and abroad.

The politics of arts funding (2)

Then, of course, there are criticisms of those who do receive funding! L.M.R, reviewing Alan Davies’ A Sunday kind of love and other stories in The Canberra Times (26 August), was not impressed, saying that the book, was “hardly designed to pass away an odd hour pleasurably. A baffling hour would be a better description”. Indeed, L.M.R. says, “they are not stories”. Rather, “each is a description of a mood, usually not accounted for”. S/he continues in this critical vein, concluding:

It was published with the help of the Commonwealth Literary Fund. I wonder why?

On the other hand, Professor T. Inglis Moore, who was on the Fund’s Advisory Board wrote a letter to the editor of The Canberra Times (5 October) correcting some points that had been made in an editorial. Apparently, the editorial had implied that grants made to writers were a new venture involving “experimentation or even gambling”. On the contrary, said Moore, the annual grants had been happening for 21 years, and formed “a well tried, sound, and constructive method of aiding our literary development”.

The editorial also seems to have implied that not all grants resulted in great works. Moore responded that there is “of course … an element of risk” but that the risk is minimised because the applications “are given careful consideration by the Fund’s Advisory Board and Parliamentary Committee”, and the “grants are made only to writers who have proved themselves … and for projects considered suitable to their particular talents”. So, in this year, he says, “it is hardly rash gambling to back Judith Wright to write good poetry and critical essays and Bill Harney to produce an expert work dealing with aborigines”.

Inevitably, though, there are occasional “failures or disappointments, but the great majority of the writers justified their awards satisfactorily, and some productions have been outstanding”. He draws a comparison with government support of the CSIRO, and concludes

there would be no success without experimentation, the risks undertaken are reasonable, and the rewards of the venture are very well worthwhile, whether in science or literature.

CLF Lectures

In addition to awarding fellowships, the CLF also supported lectures on literature around the country. Some of these were reported in the newspapers. Announcing the 1961 Fellowship winners on 2 October, The Canberra Times noted that increased interest had been shown in lectures in Australian literature, and that so far that year “the lecture programmes had reached a public audience of 8,000 and a school audience of 19,000”. A week earlier, on 27 September, the paper had reported on a CLF lecture to be given by academic Evan Jones on “The Anatomy of Frustration: Short Stories of Alan Davies and Peter Cowan.” (Given the criticism I’ve shared above of Davies’ stories, I’d love to know what he said!)

The Port Lincoln Times (3 August) wrote about a two-week lecture tour around South Australia to be given by Colin Thiele, who, they said, was well-known as a poet and broadcaster. (In fact, in 1961 he published a children’s book The sun on the stubble, and two years later Storm boy, perhaps his most famous children’s book. Today, he is best known for his children’s writing.) Two weeks later, on 17 August, the same paper reported on the tour. Thiele’s theme was “Spirit of People — Spirit of Place”. He talked about the Australian spirit (and humour), and how “a good writer should be able to observe and capture this spirit”. The report concluded by sharing the list of Australian literary works, that he recommended for “basic reading”:

  • Rolf Boldrewood, Robbery under arms
  • Martin Boyd, Lucinda Brayford
  • F. D. Davison, Man-shy (read before blogging)
  • M. Barnard Eldershaw, A house is built (on my TBR)
  • Miles Franklin, All that swagger
  • Joseph Furphy, Such is life
  • Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, We of the Never Never (read before blogging)
  • Xavier Herbert, Capricornia
  • T. A. G. Hungerford, The ridge and the river
  • Henry Kingsley, The recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (on my TBR)
  • The prose works of Henry Lawson (read some before blogging)
  • Vance Palmer, The passage (read before blogging)
  • Ruth Park, The harp of the south (read before blogging)
  • Katherine [sic] S. Pritchard [sic], Coonardoo (read before blogging)
  • Henry Handel Richardson, The fortunes of Richard Mahoney
  • Randolph Stow, To the islands (on my TBR)
  • Kylie Tennant, The battlers (on my TBR)
  • Patrick White, Voss and The tree of man (read both before blogging)
  • Douglas Stewart, Four plays (read one before blogging)
  • Ray Lawler, The summer of the seventeenth doll
  • Stewart and Keesing (ed.), Australian bush ballads
  • Howarth, Thompson and Slessor, The Penguin book of Australian verse
  • W. Murdoch and Drake Brockman, Australian short stories.

Anything caught your attention?

Langston Hughes, Feet live their own life (#Review, #1961 Club)

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Today’s post for the Year Club is one of those rare occasions when I am not posting on an Australian short story. The simple reason is that I could not find one in my anthologies, and I am keen to read from my physical TBR. Happily, I found one in Great short stories by African-American writers, and it was by a writer I have read before, though it could be a bit of a cheat … read on …

Langston Hughes

Wikipedia tells us that James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was “best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance (about which I have written before).  He was also “an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist” as well as “an early innovator of jazz poetry“. My anthology editors, Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell, describe him in their biographical note, as “one of the most famous African-American writers of the [twentieth] century [who] continually published poems, plays, novels, short stories, essays, translations, children’s books, and edited anthologies”. They say that “knowing first-hand the financial difficulties and discouragement of being a writer of colour, he helped numerous African Americans get noticed and published”. Poet Kwame Alexander, writing in the Beltway poetry quarterly, adds “operas, librettos, television and film scripts” and “lyrics, essays, [and] reference manuals” to his writing credentials. He was prolific.

Wikipedia explains that like many African Americans, he was of mixed ancestry, with both of his paternal great-grandmothers being enslaved Africans, and both paternal great-grandfathers being white slave owners in Kentucky. The old story! He spent most of his childhood in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in other Midwestern cities. His parents separated soon after his birth. Apparently, his father, who “wanted to escape the racial intolerance of the United States”, moved to Cuba and then Mexico. The critical point for us, however, is that, because his mother travelled a lot for work, he was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother. “Through stories of Black resistance, dignity, and perseverance, [she] shaped his understanding of racial responsibility” and imbued him “with a duty to help his race”. Consequently, continues Wikipedia, he “identified with neglected and downtrodden black people all his life, and centered their lives honestly in his work”.

I’ll leave his biography here, but if you are interested, start at Wikipedia which has an extensive, well-referenced article.

I mentioned that I have read him before – and I have, but in poetry anthologies, some of them for children. He captured my attention, not just because he was new to me but because his subject matter – social justice and civil rights – interests me. I have not read his prose before.

“Feet live their own life”

I said in my opening paragraph that this selection for the Year Club could be a bit of a cheat. This is because this story was originally published in the Chicago Defender in 1943. However, my anthologists selected the story from a book published in 1961, and say that the version there is “an expansion and revision” of that original column. I think this makes it valid for the 1961 Year Club!

So, the story. Wikipedia pointed me to The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, which says that soon after inaugurating a theatre group in Chicago in 1941, Hughes went to work for the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper founded in 1905. It was here that Hughes introduced readers to his character Jesse B. Semple, aka Simple. The Hall of Fame says that

Hughes combined powerful rhetoric with down-home humor to attack or reflect the conditions of African-Americans at the time. He was eloquent and clear – and no injustice escaped his literary wrath. To some, this column was Hughes’ most powerful and relevant work. He became the voice of a people who were beginning to secure their place in society.  Hughes wrote his column for the Defender for 20 years.

“Feet live their own life” is, in fact, based on Hughes’ first column in the Defender, making it an excellent introduction to the character. Being a column, it is a very short short story, running to just three pages in the anthology. It is set in a bar, as I think are all the Simple stories, and comprises a conversation between an unnamed, somewhat serious narrator, a foil in other words, and Simple. It starts:

“If you want to know about my life,” said Simple as he blew the foam from the top of the newly filled glass the bartender put before him, “don’t look at my face, don’t look at my hands. Look at my feet and see if you can tell how long I been standing on them.”

It is a humorous character study with a political edge and a lacing of wisdom. Simple is – as his name suggests – an ordinary man, a black everyman. In this story, he introduces his readers to the travails of his life, to which those like him, the people Hughes wanted to reach and represent, could relate:

These feet have supported everything from a cotton bale to a hongry woman. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with coloured. These feet have stood at altars, crap tables, free lunches, bars, graves, kitchen doors, betting windows, hospital clinics, WPA desks, social security railings, and in all kinds of lines from soup lines to the draft …

These are life events his readers knew. When our narrator counters that all this is general, and asks for something specific that his feet have done, Simple tells him how his right foot had broken the window of a white man’s shop and his left foot had set him off running from the cops. But why, asks our narrator, would he “go around kicking out windows”. Simple says

“You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple – else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great-grandpa in slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window and say, ‘It ain’t mine! Bam-mmm-mm-m!’ and kick it out?”

When our logical narrator suggests that the bar glass he is drinking from is also not his, but he’s not smashing that, Simple responds, logically

“It’s got my beer in it”

I think you get the gist. Simple is a comic character who is able to say the outrageous and the human things and bring his point home. He is humorous and wise, silly and pointed at the same time. I enjoy writing like this, writing that tells the truth with warmth and humour.

I am sure many of you will know Langston Hughes. I’d love to hear your thoughts about reading him – in whatever form you have.

* Read for the 1961 reading week run by Karen (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon (Stuck in a Book).

Langston Hughes
“Feet live their own life” (first published in The best of Simple, 1961)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 181-183
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online in audio version at archive.org and



Monday musings on Australian literature: 1961 in fiction

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Once again it’s Karen’s (Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling) and Simon’s (Stuck in a Book) “Year Club” week. This time, it is 1961, and it runs from 13th to 19th April. Once again, I am devoting my Monday Musings to the week.

I have already written about 1960s for the 1962 Club. It was an exciting decade, one in which we thought we were really going to change the world for the better. Older and wiser now, I can see how naive that was. But, idealism is not a bad thing, and some good changes did happen. Just not enough. This decade was also the height of the Cold War. Literature reflected all of this – the enthusiasm for change looking towards a fairer more equitable world, the fear of communism, and the tension between the two. In Australia, the conservative government of Robert Menzies had a strong grip.

A brief 1961 literary recap

Books were, naturally, published across all forms, but my focus is Australian fiction, so here is a selection of novels published in 1961:

Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse
  • James Aldridge, The last exile
  • Mena Calthorpe, The dyehouse (my review)
  • A. Bertram Chandler, The rim of space
  • Kenneth Cook, Wake in fright
  • Dymphna Cusack, Heatwave in Berlin
  • Nene Gare, The fringe dwellers (Bill’s review)
  • Xavier Herbert, Soldiers’ women
  • Elizabeth Kata, Be ready with bells and drums
  • H.A. (Harold) Lindsay, Janie McLachlan
  • John O’Grady, No kava for Johnny
  • Ruth Park, The good looking women (aka Serpent’s Delight) 
  • Hal Porter, The tilted cross
  • F. J. Thwaites, Beyond the rainbow
  • George Turner, A stranger and afraid
  • Arthur Upfield, The white savage
  • Judah Waten, Time of conflict
  • Morris West, Daughter of silence
  • Patrick White, Riders in the chariot (Lisa’s review)

Several short stories, and short story collections were published, including by some favourite writers of mine like Thea Astley and Shirley Hazzard, by other writers I’ve posted on here before like D’Arcy Niland and Hal Porter, and by one Ray Mathew, an Australian expat whom I discovered around a decade ago when I attended my first Ray Mathew annual lecture at the NLA.

The thing about the 1960s is that we start to see more authors appear that we still hear of today, even if not all are still keenly read.

The main literary award made this year was the Miles Franklin, which went to Patrick White’s Riders in the chariot. The ALS Gold Medal was not awarded in 1961.

Novelists born this year include Jordie Albiston (who died in 2022) and Richard Flanagan (who should need no introduction).

The state of the art

As for previous club years, I checked Trove for what newspapers were saying about Australian fiction. However, because 1961 is less than 70 years ago, I frequently confronted roadblocks, with Trove regularly telling me that “This newspaper article is still within its copyright period and can’t be displayed on Trove right now. The National Library of Australia will make it available as soon as copyright permits, or with the copyright holder’s permission”. Fortunately, some newspapers have – generously – released their material “ahead” of time! Thank you The Canberra Times, and more specialist papers like The Australian Jewish Times and Tribune.

Communists and other reformists

Communism was still a hot topic in the 1960s, and several writers in my 1961 list were Communists or, if not, Marxist or leftist writers, writers like Mena Calthorpe, Dymphna Cusack, Judah Waten – and Frank Hardy, whose nonfiction book about his most famous novel Power without glory, The Hard Way: The Story Behind Power without Glory, was published in this year.

I’ll start with Frank Hardy, who wrote a piece for Tribune (June 7) about The Communist Party of Australia’s Draft Resolution for its 19th Congress. ALS reviewer Teri Merlyn wrote in 2005 that “Hardy’s commitment to literature as a vehicle for working-class education and the Australian radical literary tradition was unwavering”. This is on display in his response to the Draft Resolution, for which he proposes the following additional lines:

An important part in interpreting Australian reality is played by realist literature and art. Art which lays bare the contradictions of capitalism, exposes the ramifications of monopoly, affirms class struggle, and reveals the worth and dignity of the working people and their ability to transform society.

While the “Party’s work has been decisive in the development of the working class literature and art movement”, this work has, he says, been “marred” by “errors”. He briefly discusses these, before concluding that literature and art are part of “the working class arsenal”, and the Party must make it a “whole party” issue.

Given the period, many of our serious writers were keenly interested in reform. What is interesting is how contemporary reviewers saw their works. For example, Mena Calthorpe’s The dye house is a factory novel, which, says The Canberra Times‘ reviewer, R.R. (16 September) ‘is “formula” novel, set in a Sydney textile factory’, and, “despite its immaturity of style … an impressive piece of work”. It’s a mixed review, panning much but also suggesting she has potential. R.R. suggests that editing out ‘schoolgirl words as “clatter,” “click clack,” and “tic tac,” which jangle irritatingly through it, would improve it immensely’. I, however, loved this language, as I wrote in my review.

Similarly, M.P., writing in The Canberra Times (13 May) about Dymphna Cusack’s Heatwave in Berlin, is less than complimentary. S/he describes its political content, adds s/he is not qualified to confirm the facts, and then critiques the book as

something which cannot be taken very seriously. The characters have the larger-than-life quality of figures in a melodrama, and they speak with something of the same staginess.

Not having read the book, I can’t comment, but there are some reviews from, for example, Hungarian and Estonian readers on GoodReads whose reflections offer some fascinating perspectives.

The aforementioned R.R. also reviewed Nene Gare’s novel, The fringe-dwellers, in The Canberra Times (21 October). S/he is far more complimentary about this one, calling it “a most compelling book and one of the best written on this theme”. Today, it would be critiqued for not being an “own story”, for being a story about First Nations people by a white writer. However, this was 1961, and Gare, I think, brought an important story into the main culture. It draws from her experiences in Geraldton, Western Australia, between 1952 and 1954, when her husband was District Officer with the Native Welfare Department. R.R. writes that Gare

captured completely the atmosphere of the part-aboriginal community—its pride, its squalor, and its terrible inertia — people caught between two ways of life and belonging to neither.

S/he says that it has a few – but not serious – false notes, and pronounces it “an outstandingly good, pertinent, and touching story”.

On reviewing

In my last Year Club post (for 1925), I shared some examples of reviewing style. I found some more interesting examples for this year, but will share just one here, by “Tinker”, who reviewed four books in The Canberra Times (12 August), including two by Australian writers, One rose less, by Pat Flower, and And death came too, by Helen Mace. Tinker – who must surely be a “he” – writes of the four books that, three

are by women authors, another saddening fact drawing evidence to the sex’s determination to invade almost every field of male activity.

What? Further, while “he” thinks that Flower’s book is the better of the two Aussies, he says she “just cannot resist the feminine love for tidying up”! Mace’s novel which “has some reasonably good word pictures of the Victorian countryside, but not so good as Pat Flowers’ Sydney scenes” also “unfortunately … suffers from the female tidying up complex”. Feminism still has battles to fight, but reviewers would be unlikely to get away with this today! Incidentally, several of Pat Rose’s novels have been republished in the 2020s.

I found much more, and might write a Part 2 next week. We’ll see … meanwhile I hope this post has piqued your interest about 1961.

Sources

(Besides those linked in the post)

Previous “Year Club” Monday Musings: 1925, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1940, 1952, 1954, 1962 and 1970.

Do you plan to take part in the 1961 Club – and if so how?

Stella Prize 2026 Shortlist announced

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Past performance, they say, is no indicator of future performance, but when it comes to me, past performance is often a very good indicator. What I mean is that once again I have not done well at having read the Stella Prize shortlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years, the most I’ve read at the time of the announcement has been two (in 2019). Last year I’d read one, and this year I will finish one of them tonight (but the review may not come until next week given my busy-ness right now).

I watched the announcement live on Stella’s YouTube channel, at 6.30pm tonight. Stella CEO Fiona Sweet opened the event with Toni Morrison’s famous quote that

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it”.

You can see where this is going can’t you! Her point was that these books that haven’t been written yet are what Stella is about. It is, she said, “an act of bravery to write into silence and fill the gap”.

Fiona was followed by Stella’s founding donor, Paula McLean. She also quoted an author, this time an American male author much loved for his nature writing (and on my TBR for the longest time), Barry Lopez. He said that

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

This, too, is what the Stella Prize is about. Both said so much more but I think the recording will be available on the Stella website, where you can also read all about the shortlist, including the judges comments.

So let’s just get on with the main game. The shortlist was presented by ABC’s Bookshelf show co-host Kate Evans and Kamilaroi/Gomeroi author and academic Dr Amy Thunig-McGregor. They discussed each book in turn, teasing out what they liked about the books, and identifying, in particular, the ideas that link many of the books. Those ideas included the violence in systems, and, on the positive side, the love and relationships people find in community (whatever that community is.) They also talked about how several of the books are formally interesting – and sometimes challenging to them (like graphic novels!)

The shortlist

So, 212 books became a longlist of 12, which became a shortlist of 6 – and here they are, in alphabetical order by author, which is also how they were presented:

So, 3 fiction (including one graphic novel), one poetry collection, and two works of nonfiction. Two of the shortlisted authors are First Nations writers. I am thrilled that I have three of these on my TBR, and will in fact finish Walton’s novel tonight. It makes another important contribution to truth telling – but more on that in my post.

As I reported in my recent longlist post, this year’s judging panel comprises bookseller, editor, and author, Jaclyn Crupi; academic and author, Sophie Gee; author, screenwriter, and broadcaster, Benjamin Law; journalist, writer, and facilitator, Gillian O’Shaughnessy; author and editor, Ellen van Neerven. Sophie Gee is this year’s Chair.

Each of the shortlisted authors will receive $5000, with the winner receiving $60,000. The winner will be announced on 13 May.

I will close with one sentence from the judges (from the Stella website):

These six wonderful books reflect the creative vitality, literary rigor, and expressive richness of Australian women’s and non-binary writing …

Any comments?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Tech noir

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The genres – or, perhaps I mean sub-genres – keep coming. Recently, I’ve started hearing about something called tech noir. I’ve heard for some time of rural (or outback or drought) noir, and have read some in that genre because I love books with a strong sense of place. I am also interested in technology and where it is taking us, but as you probably know I don’t gravitate to futuristic stories, so I am not at all familiar with trends in such writing.

Definition

I’ll start with definitions, and with my go-to source, Wikipedia. What I found there surprised me, though it shouldn’t have, because this sub-genre, like many is not limited to fiction. Wikipedia says that it is a

hybrid genre of fiction, particularly film, combining film noir and science fiction, epitomized by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). The tech-noir presents “technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality”. It can be characterized by dark, urban settings, while depicting technology ranging from retrofuturism to classic futurism. Tech noir combines the high-tech worlds of sci-fi with the dark, gritty, and bleak atmosphere of film noir.

It then says that it is “also known as cyber noir, future noir, neo-noir science fiction and science fiction noir”, and that James Cameron coined the term, via the name of a nightclub in The Terminator. It provides some pre-history, but of course origins are always murky because these movements never appear out of nowhere. Do check out Wikipedia’s article if you are interested. I’m leaving it here because, although Wikipedia describes tech noir as a “genre of fiction, particularly film” it does not talk about any other type of fiction besides film, and of course, I am interested in prose fiction (aka novels).

So, regarding novels, I’ve seen the genre described in various ways. There’s tech noir, of course. Indeed, it was references to Australian author Ashley Kalagian Blunt being “Australia’s queen of tech noir” that inspired this post. But, I’ve also seen terms like electronic crime and high-tech crime. The point is that this genre blends traditional 1940s noir elements, like cynical investigators, moral ambiguity, and atmospheric settings, with futuristic or high-tech elements like AI, cybercrime, and the dark web. The stories tend to be urban, and focus on modern concerns about privacy, identity, and security, not to mention issues like corporate greed. The misuse of technology is common and stories will often confront existential questions about what it means to be human. Like 1940s noir, tech noir is grounded in anxieties about the future, which is usually seen as bleak.

Just how far this bleakness extends can vary. Noir stories are by definition bleak or dark. The world, if not always doomed, is seen through a dark lens. But there can be humour, most likely satirical, and the endings aren’t necessarily depressing. Or, so I believe!

Tech noir’s precursors can be found in cyberpunk, with books like Philip K Dick’s 1968 Do androids dream of electric sheep and William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer. (Classics now, I know, but I haven’t read them.) According to Wikipedia, Neuromancer is “set in a near-future dystopia [and] follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted into a crew by a powerful artificial intelligence and a traumatised former soldier to complete a high-stakes heist”. I must say, this feels a bit like a case of today’s tech noir is yesterday’s cyberpunk? Wikipedia describes cyberpunk as “using elements from crime fiction—particularly hardboiled detective fiction and film noir—and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society”. What do you think?

Tech noir in Australia

My research into Australian writers in this field brought up Dorothy Johnston (see my posts on her). Wikipedia says that her 2000-published novel, The Trojan dog “was one of the first Australian novels to give electronic crime a central place”.

However, despite those references I found to Ashley Kalagian Blunt as Australia’s tech noir queen, I have to say that my internet searches did not produce a large number of writers in this field, and most of those I list below do not seem to write exclusively or even mainly in this field. But, I am out of my comfort zone, so I might have missed something big.

Selected Australian tech noir novels:

  • Ashley Kalagian Blunt: Dark mode (2023, Sydney-based thriller about a series of murders linked to the dark web); Like, follow, die (2025, psychological thriller examining the impact of online radicalism, cybercrime, and online forums on real-world violence)
  • Andrew Croome: Midnight empire (my review) (2012, thriller about drone warfare fought in the Middle East from the Nevada desert)
  • Dorothy Johnston: The Trojan dog (2000, Canberra-set crime about computer fraud and bureaucracy)
  • Zane Lovitt: Black teeth (2016, Melbourne-based noir with a tech focus, featuring a computer geek whose day-job is to search the internet to confirm that people’s CVs are real)
  • Jonathan Macpherson: Brazen violations (2016, high-tech thriller about a cop who has a bugging device implanted in his chest allowing him to be controlled by a criminal family)

As you see a small list. I did find a couple of others, but not many. Except for Blunt’s novels, these are ten or more years old. I know some readers of my blog – I’m looking at you Bill, in particular – might know more. I’d love anyone who has read in this area to leap in and correct any misconceptions I have and/or expand on what I have said.

So, over to you. Do you read “tech noir”? And if so, I’d love to hear your thoughts and your favourites?

Six degrees of separation, FROM The correspondent TO …

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This month’s SixDegrees occurs the weekend we here in Australia celebrate (or, commemorate, depending your point-of-view) Easter. Yes, I know that we are not the only country to do this, but I also know that not all countries make it a four-day weekend as we do. So, I just thought I’d share this little bit of Aussie culture. The other point of course is that for us it is autumn so all the spring-focused cards and decorations that we used to be – and still do tend to be – regaled with, really don’t make literal sense for us. Now, having burbled on too much, I’ll move on to the meme, starting with the usual reminder that if you don’t know this meme and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated a book I haven’t read, though I have been told I would like it, Virginia Evans’ The correspondent. From what I’ve heard, I suspect it would be up my alley but whether I’ll get to it is another thing. It is apparently about a 73-year-old woman who writes letters every morning – to friends, family and others including apparently someone to whom she never actually mails the letter. It is also, apparently, an epistolary novel as the story is told through these letters and emails.

Book cover

The obvious thing for me would be to link to an epistolary novel, but most of those I’ve reviewed here I’ve linked before and I don’t feel like going down that path. Instead, I’m going down the 70-something woman path. Charlotte Wood’s The weekend (my review) features not one or two, but three 70-something women. The story takes place over a weekend during which they come together to clear out the house of the recently departed fourth member of their group. Without her as their glue, their relationship is tested but, the centre holds in the end.

The women in The weekend are not your stereotypical older woman – the invisible grandma who cooks and knits for the family. They are professional women who are facing aging and ageism, and are still actively engaged in life, ready to fight for what they want (when they are not arguing amongst themselves). Another character who is definitely not your stereotypical sweet old lady is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (my review). She is retired (and moves into her 70s during the novel), but is still a force around town, compassionate at times but definitely not the cuddly, apple-pie type.

Elizabeth Jolley, The orchard thieves

Another strong, older 70-something woman, albeit getting us into grandmother territory, is the protagonist in Elizabeth Jolley’s Orchard thieves (my review). This is a deliciously wise and meditative, warm and witty book about generations, seen from a grandmother who worries about her daughters and grandsons, and uses all the wisdom she can to re-stabilise rising tensions. There are no pat answers, but a realistic understanding of the changes we all go through in life and how those changes impact family relationships as stresses – financial, health, the pressures of just plain living – rise and fall.

Shining a very different light on ageing women is Thea Astley in her memorable novella, Coda (my post). Kathleen’s age is not given, but she must be at least 70s. The point is she is moving into dementia. “I’m losing my nouns” is the novel’s opening line. This is a witty, but darkly clear-eyed interrogation of ageing and the loss of agency that comes with it – with or without dementia, really – and of children who are unable to cope let alone empathise with what is happening to their mother.

Another older woman who is losing her memory is 75-year-old Ruth in Fiona McFarlane’s The night guest (my review). This is not a satirical novel like Astley’s but its subject matter – including ageing, the loss of agency, and duty of care – are similar. McFarlane tells her story through a number of visitors and/or visitations – real and imaginary – and keeps us about as unsettled as Ruth is while we try to comprehend what is going on for her.

Rabih Alameddine, An unnecessary woman

Another woman living alone, but not experiencing dementia, is Rabih Almeddine’s 72-year-old divorced, childless protagonist in An unnecessary woman (my review). Living in Beirut, she is a reader and a translator of the books she reads into Arabic. It is her life’s work, though her translations are never published. She has lived through war. Both lonely and alone, she is aware of how others see her, and of challenges to come, but when I read it, I was most interested in what she had to say about reading and literature.

I did something different this month, which was to stick with one theme – older women protagonists. Most ended up being Australian, mainly because, while I have read many non-Australian older protagonists, most were before blogging. I liked the range of women I met in these books. They all face their challenges with strong presence of mind (even where the mind is going). They prove what most of us know. Age does not stop us engaging with life. These books provide a great opportunity for us to learn from the experiences of those ahead of us, and to think about how we want to do it.

Have you read The correspondent and, regardless, what would you link to?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Blake Poetry Prize

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Coincidentally, I reviewed a book of poetry by Paris Rosemont just as the longlist for the current Blake Poetry Prize was announced, and it includes a poem by her. The timing seemed right to give this prize some air. I have mentioned it before – but only in passing in my 2024 Poetry Month post in which I wrote about the Kings College Choir Cambridge Performing an Australian poem set to music. The poem was On finding Charlotte in the anthropological record by poet and visual artist, Judith Nangala Crispin, and it won the Blake Poetry Prize in 2020 (see the poet read it online here).

The Blake Prize is named for William Blake, who, England’s Blake Society writes, was “unusually … equally a writer and a visual artist”. Indeed the Society apparently laid a stone on his grave that reads ‘Poet Artist Prophet’. Now you may have noticed that I wrote “the Blake Prize”, because in Australia it was, initially, an art prize. Australia’s Blake Society and the prize were established in 1951, with the prize awarded annually until 2015. From 2016, it has been awarded biennially. Originally titled the Blake Prize for Religious Art, it is now, simply, the Blake Prize, with the criterion broadening out to, says Wikipedia, “art that explores spirituality”. You can read some of the complicated history of the prize – including controversies concerning the definition of “religious” – in the Wikipedia article.

Meanwhile, I’ll get to the Blake Poetry Prize. It is related to the above prize, and is now managed by the same organisation, the Liverpool Powerhouse, but in conjunction with WestWords. It is for “a new work of 100 lines or less, focused on non-sectarian spiritual and religious topics”, and is worth A$5,000. WestWords currently describes it as

an open poetry prize that challenges poets, both national and international, in conversations concerning faith, spirituality, religion and/or belief.

Further down the page, it reiterates that the prize is “strictly non-sectarian” and says that “all poems entered must have a recognisable religious or spiritual integrity and demonstrate high degrees of artistic and conceptual proficiency”.

AustLit summarises the prize’s short but chequered history:

The Blake Poetry Prize was established in 2008 by The Blake Society, in partnership with the NSW Writers’ Centre and sponsored by Leichhardt Council in NSW. From 2016 (after a loss in funding), Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre (CPAC)* and Liverpool City Council took over funding and managing both the art prize and the poetry prize, with events moving to Casula. From 2017, management was intended to shift to Liverpool City Library, in conjunction with CPAC, but bookshop Westwords ultimately took the library’s role in the partnership.

WestWords, in its current iteration, is far, far more than a bookshop (as you can read here), but it must have started as a bookshop.

Like the art prize, the poetry prize is now presented biennially. And I am confused, because Wikipedia and AustLit say the Poetry Prize was established in 2008, and it has been biennial for a few years, yet this year’s longlist is labelled the 69th. It seems that the Poetry Prize numbering is aligned with the numbering of the Art Prize.

Blake Poetry Prize Winners (2008-2024)

The winners to date are:

  • 2008: Mark Tredinnick, “Have You Seen”
  • 2009: John Watson, “Four Ways to Approach the Numinous”
  • 2010: Tasha Sudan, “Rahula”
  • 2011: Robert Adamson, “Via Negativa, The Divine Dark”
  • 2012: Graham Kershaw, “Altar Rock”
  • 2013: Anthony Lawrence, “Appellations”
  • 2014: Dave Drayton, “Threnodials”
  • 2017: Julie Watts, “The Story of Julian who never knew that we loved him”
  • 2020: Judith Nangala Crispin, “On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record”
  • 2022: Simone King, “Surfing Again”
  • 2024: Coco X. Huang, “Three Lessons”

69th Blake Poetry Prize Longlist (2026)

This year’s prize was judged by three poets – Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Kevin Brophy and last year’s winner, Coco X. Huang.

The longlist for this year’s prize was presented on the WestWords site in a seemingly random order – poetic licence, perhaps? But, it’s a long longlist so, because I am librarian-trained and like to make finding information easy, I have reorganised it into alphabetical order by poet’s last name (to the best of my knowledge). Apologies if I have upset any listing or naming conventions. I have not, however, changed the capitalisation of the titles (to suit my editorial convention) as poets can be particular about things like punctuation. Links on poets are to any posts I have tagged with the poet’s name, though the posts are not necessarily on their poetry!

  • Sela Ahosivi-Atiola, Mending Skies
  • Allison Browning, There’s No Such Thing as Astrology (Or: The last Trump/Odious Joy)
  • Gayelene Carbis, Divinations
  • Phillippa Cordwell, Father 
  • Gregory Day, The Church Was Strangely Empty But The Day Outside Was Full: his collection Southsightedness is on my TBR
  • Adrienne Eberhard, Ten Blessings of Upper Blessington 
  • Jo Gardiner, Giornata
  • Ross Gillett, Cave Faith
  • Ross Gillett, The Room and the River
  • Stephanie Green, Equilateral
  • Catherine Johnstone, THE DRAWING: a sestina
  • Cliff Kemmett, Ahead Of Us, Our Past Burns Still 
  • Cate Kennedy, Suddenly Getting Religion
  • Moira Kirkwood, Tiny home
  • Jeanine Leane, Gundyarri-galang bila-gu
  • Wes Lee, Prayer at the Cove 
  • Wes Lee, The broken smashed rubble of everything I owned
  • Gershon Maller, The Transcendentalist
  • Shey Marque, The Body as Tidal Scripture
  • Freshta Nawabi, Jigar in a Jar
  • Kerrie Nelson, Why would you drive on a day like this, unless for good reason
  • Jenny Pollak, A faint echo from the South
  • Omar Sakr, Ode to Prednisone
  • Kathryn Reese, Post Vespers 
  • Paris Rosemont, Verdigrisleeves
  • Josephine Shevchenko, Invisible but Potent
  • Laura Jan Shore, Sometimes A River Wave
  • Ella Skilbeck-Porter, Intonation
  • Terri Slanovits, Aftermath
  • David Terelinck, Watching the Storm from My Hospital Bed
  • Mark Tredinnick, Nothing Will Be Lost: won the inaugural Montreal International Poetry Prize in 2011, and a previous winner of this prize (among others)
  • Anders Villani, Under the Banner of Heaven
  • Chen Wang, The Woman Who Refused the Kingdom of Forgetting
  • Julie Watts, Ad honorem Patti Smith
  • Kimberly Williams, St. Mary and the Hula Dancer
  • Beth Yahp, Visitation/Turtle-Shaped

Some of these may be available online, but I decided I’d rather spend my time reading than check every one in the hope of finding a couple! Sorry!

The shortlist will be announced on 2 April, and the winners on 1 May.

Have you read any of these poets, or do you follow and poetry prizes? I’d love to hear your thoughts …

* Now the Liverpool Powerhouse.

Paris Rosemont, Barefoot poetess (#BookReview)

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Fierce, raw, honest are all clichés used to describe strong, powerful writing, but when it comes to Paris Rosemont’s poetry collection, Barefoot poetess, they are hard to go past. However, I prefer to avoid review clichés, so let’s start again …

Paris Rosemont’s second poetry collection, Barefoot poetess, turned out to be quite the page-turner for me. This is not something I expect to experience with a poetry collection, albeit I admit to having read some page-turner verse novels. The thing is that it was a page-turner as much for its language, tone and formal inventiveness, as for its content, though the content engaged me too, from the opening poem which I excerpted in my recent World Poetry Day post. Indeed, it was that poem which convinced me to choose this book next from my review copies TBR pile.

Rosemont is a Sydney-based, second-generation Asian-Australian performance poet, and Barefoot poetess is her second collection of poetry. Her first, Banana girl (2023), was listed for several awards nationally and internationally, and won the “Distinguished Favourite” award in the 2025 NYC Independent Press Awards. My sense is that writing as a performance poet is partly what makes her poetry so accessible. Poetry really is best read aloud. Performance poets know this. They know how to infuse their poetry with the sort of power that can quickly draw their audience in. A generalisation – yes – but like most generalisations it has a basis in truth.

As I wrote in my World Poetry Day post, poet Tim Loveday describes Barefoot poetess in his Introduction as “confessional poetry in all its glorious exhibitionism”, which means that, almost by definition, they will embody the cliches of “raw” and “honest”. Certainly they appear to capture something of Rosemont’s life to date, the pain of broken relationships and the thrill of finding new ones, the experience of being Asian in a non-Asian world, the difficult act of balancing motherhood against finding her creative self. It unapologetically confronts living in a complex world. Take the title. We second-generation feminists eschewed gendered nomenclatures like, well, to be blunt, “poetess”. However, in her opening note Rosemont respects the fortitude of women who paved the way for her – which included losing terms like this – but then reclaims “poetess as an act of rebellion”. It feels, she says, “wild and whimsical, seductive and a little dangerous. I like the illicit feeling of it in my mouth… “.

I like this too. I like it because it reclaims this word with intention, because being a poetess in the past could be dangerous. Any woman who was clever with words, who self-expressed with little care for the niceties of feminine expectations, was at risk. This word encompasses that history and Rosemont uses it with vigour. So, back to that opening poem that got me in, “Mama’s flown away with the mockingbirds”. It’s a heartbreaker about mothering when you are broken, about the wisdom of kids who “know”, and about a mother’s recognition of the costs:

I pity these wretched orphans. Imagine
how unsettling it must feel to be sung
to sleep by a ghost who knows
their favourite lullabies and looks so
like someone they once knew.

[But]

… their mother has brokered a fool’s-
gold escape. She has mortgaged her heart.
The cost of her wings. Two tiny souls.

What an opener.

“making poetry tutors blush”

There is a trajectory to the collection, though it’s not simply chronological. It picks up on themes and moves us through aspects of her life – her childhood as a migrant’s daughter, her failed marriage and other relationships that brought pain or joy or both, passion and sexuality, motherhood, not to mention the act of becoming a poet (“paris rosemont: making poetry tutors blush since 2022”, from “(ii) poetry with pip”). The opening poem is followed by poems expressing her anguished questions, before we move back into an earlier chronology – her migrant father’s arrival in Australia (“The Colombo Plan”) and her marriage (“Foot and spouse disease”) – and then out again. Words (like “kawasakis” and “koels”) and people (like her father and lovers, the various yous) link poems and ideas across the collection, while the ordering of the poems leave us in no doubt about intent. Life is complex. Painful poems about fractured and destructive love, are followed by poems about love’s experiments, which are followed by love found. Prose poems, which convey story more straightforwardly (but never simply), are interspersed with wilder poems and quieter ones, encapsulating more emotional responses. The prose poem “Evaporated milk” about motherhood’s dilemmas is followed by poems about the pains and dangers of love, home and childhood. Punches are not pulled, knuckles are bared, in “Terracotta knuckles”, “Home is where the dark is”, and the later “Simon says” (which starts as a prose poem but splinters at the end).

The ideas and feelings in this collection are personal and powerful. They keep us reading – often with hearts in mouths. But what makes the reading exciting is, as I’ve already said, the language, the variety of and experimentation with form, and the wit. Wit underpins many of the poems, regardless of how serious the content. “Lila’s Mixtape of Lovers” comprises 6 stanzas in what Rosemont calls a 69-er, her “contemporary twist on the form 9x9x9”. Each stanza is inspired by songs, ranging from a sitcom theme song to one from alternative rock band Garbage. They document love’s failures, and are part of a group of poems in which innuendo and explicit sexual wordplay bounce against each other to convey love’s power to inspire and destroy. “Fierce” is right for these poems, which can be both shocking and funny at once.

But there are also graceful poems expressing joy (and, admittedly, its uncertainty) and more lighthearted poems (like the self-deprecating “(i) tea with tony”). I enjoyed – partly because I love these cactus and the deserts they are found in – “We are Saguaro”. It’s a reverse poem which neatly questions the speaker’s ability to love. If you read it forwards and then in reverse, the nuance is hopeful. However, if you only read it forwards … It jolts rather than flows, but the point is made.

The poems in Barefoot poetess are accessible but not simple. They require attention – but they repay that attention with surprises of recognition (“is that …? is she really …?”, from “(iii) shooting stars”), and with an energy that is infectious. These are poems I can imagine reading again to see what more they might say.

Paris Rosemont
Barefoot poetess
Parramatta: WestWords, 2025
87pp.
ISBN: 9781923044456

(Review copy courtesy WestWords)

Monday musings on Australian literature: Melbourne, a City of Literature?

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A year ago I finally wrote a post on the UNESCO Cities of Literature, focusing on Melbourne’s designation as UNESCO’s second such city in 2008, and Hobart’s addition as Australia’s second city in 2023. The full list is available online at the Cities of Literature website.

As I wrote in that post, the criteria against which cities are assessed aren’t specifically listed, but the Cities of Literature website says that these Cities “share similar characteristics”, which presumably draw from the criteria. The characteristics are:

  • Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing in the city
  • Quality and quantity of educational programmes focusing on domestic or foreign literature at primary, secondary and tertiary levels
  • Literature, drama and/or poetry playing an important role in the city
  • Hosting literary events and festivals which promote domestic and foreign literature
  • Existence of libraries, bookstores and public or private cultural centres which preserve, promote and disseminate domestic and foreign literature
  • Involvement by the publishing sector in translating literary works from diverse national languages and foreign literature
  • Active involvement of traditional and new media in promoting literature and strengthening the market for literary products.

Again, in last year’s post, I shared that UNESCO has pages for some of the cities. Melbourne’s (Naarm) commences with:

Celebrated for its vibrant literary culture, Melbourne supports a diverse range of writers, a prosperous publishing industry, a successful culture of independent bookselling, a wide variety of literary organisations, a well-established culture of reading and is actively involved in many events and festivals.

In addition to this, Melbourne has its own City of Literature website, in which it describes what this means and what Melbourne does to support literature and reading.

Now here’s the thing, and why I am writing this post today, Melbourne’s credentials are currently being questioned by some of its own, for a couple of very good reasons. Last year, Melbourne University Press announced that it would cease publication of one of Australia’s longest-running literary magazines, Meanjin, at the end of 2025. Established in Brisbane in 1940, Meanjin had been published in Melbourne since 1945. This was devastating news to the literary community, because this magazine is one of our treasures, for both its history and what it still does. Fortunately, a last minute reprieve has seen Meanjin return to its originating state with the Queensland University of Technology acquiring it early this year. This is great for Meanjin, but it does nothing for the City of Literature.

And then, in January of this year, Writers Victoria (about which I have written before in my writers centre series) was told it would not receive the funding it had been receiving from the State Government (via Creative Victoria). It was given emergency funding to help it survive through to June 30, but no more after that. As Angela Glindemann wrote in The Conversation, the loss of this centre – if it cannot change the government’s mind or obtain other funding – “would make Victoria (whose capital, Melbourne, is a UNESCO City of Literature) the only mainland state without a state government-funded peak organisation for writers”. 

In the last three months, I have heard several literary commentators, besides The Conversation’s Glindemann, raise the issue of Melbourne’s City of Literature status in relation to these literary losses. The others include literary journalist Jason Steger (who was Literary Editor for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper), authors and podcasters Irma Gold and Karen Viggers (in Secrets from the Green Room, Season 7 Episode 79), and academic Patrick Stokes in ArtsHub.

Steger wrote earlier this month in his weekly emailed newsletter:

It’s dismally ironic that in Melbourne, Writers Victoria has been denied funding by the state government. Ironic because in 2008 Melbourne became only the second UNESCO City of Literature, but now could become the only state capital in Australia not to have an organisation that supports its writers.

[…]

Why are writers organisations important? Because they give crucial support to writers at all stages of their careers. They provide information, resources, workshops and plenty more. They also employ writers to conduct workshops and teach. In 2025 Writers Victoria employed 70 tutors, paying $50,000 in fees.

Irma Gold and Karen Viggers in their podcast speak from personal experience about the value of writers organisations to their careers, as does Toni Jordan in The Conversation’s article. These three writers (as did others I quoted in my Writers Victoria post) see writers centres as critical to supporting emerging writers and to the ongoing education of established writers. (Worryingly, The Conversation says that Writers Victoria is not the only one to confront threats to its existence in recent times.)

Stokes brings into his argument a recent controversy involving the State Library of Victoria and its direction, about which you can read at the ArtsHub link I’ve provided. Here I will simply share Stokes’ main point which is that

A library that is reduced to a museum has lost its inherent function. Likewise, the City of Literature designation shouldn’t turn a city into a sort of literary museum, a celebration of past glories now preserved under glass or atop marble plinths. It needs to reflect a commitment that’s as much forward-directed as backward. Cities of Literature ought to be as much about the books that are not yet written as the ones that already are.

I’m not sure that these actions would – or should – affect Melbourne’s City of Literature status, but they are a worry, on their own and as potentially indicative of a trend (particularly in Victoria right now) to cutting support for the arts. If you are a Victorian resident, you can sign a petition to the Victorian Parliament requesting it to “reverse the decision to cut state funding to Writers Victoria”. The petition is open until late April.

Thoughts?