Over the years I have often listed the books I gave as Christmas gifts, though last year I shared the books I gave throughout the year – as Christmas, birthday and other gifts. I’m doing the same this year. Most, though not all, are Australian books. They are not necessarily my favourite reads – indeed, I haven’t read many of them – because they were chosen to suit the recipients’ likes. Those I have read I did enjoy, otherwise I wouldn’t have given them to someone else, and some of those I haven’t read are on my TBR.

• Isabel Allende, My name is Emilia del Valle (historical fiction, Chilean American)
• Maxine Beneba Clarke, Beautiful changelings (poetry collection, Australian) (on my TBR)
• Peter Carnavas, Blue whale blues (children’s picture book, Australian)
• Gregory Day, Southsightedness (poetry collection, Australian) (on my TBR)
• Garry Disher, Mischance Creek (crime fiction, Australian)
• Abbas El-Zein, Bullet, paper, rock: A memoir of war and words (memoir, Lebanese-Australian) (on my TBR)
• Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (nonfiction, Australian) (my review)
• Lily King, Heart the lover (novel, American)
• Angus Gaunt, Anna (novel, Australian, given to a few people)(my review)
• Saskia Gwinn, Scientists are saving the world (children’s nonfiction picture book, English)
• Joanne Harris, Vianne (novel, British)
• Gail Jones, The name of the sister (novel, Australian) (on my TBR)
• Kim Kelly, Touched (memoir, Australian) (my review)
• Tania McCartney, Wildlife compendium of the world: Awe-inspiring animals from every continent (children’s nonfiction picture book, Australian)
• Dinuka McKenzie, The torrent (crime fiction, Australian)
• Jen Marlin, Wind riders: Rescue on Turtle Beach (children’s chapter book, American)
• Seichō Matsumoto, Suspicion (crime fiction, Japanese)
• Meanjin: Essays that changed Australia, 1940 to today (essays, Australian)
• Robert Skinner, I’d rather not (memoir, Australian) 
• Jessica White, Habits of silence (ecobiographical essays, Australian) (on my TBR)

It’s quite a variety as you can see, but that’s because – of course – my family and friends range in age and interests. You will see a few more children’s books here than usual. You can guess why.

As for books I received this Christmas? They included two for reading group next year (so were on my Santa list), Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Beautiful changelings and Niall Williams’ This is happiness, plus Debra Dank’s new book Ankami: Stolen children, shattered families, silenced histories, and Zitkála-Šá’s American Indian stories. All wonderful choices for me, and all authors I’ve read before except for Niall Williams whom I’ve wanted to read for some time.

How about you? Care to share your Christmas book-giving and/or receiving?

Back in 2010, Kimbofo (as I like to call her from her sign on/login name) started a blog series called Triple Choice Tuesday in which she asked “bloggers, writers and readers to share three books that have had a meaningful impact on them”. She saw it as a “fun way to highlight great books, discover new authors (or bloggers) and explore different perspectives”. I was one of the early participants in 2010, when my blog was still very new (see post).

The series ran for several years, and then I guess Kim ran out of puff and/or she had mined most of the bloggers and readers she knew. She restarted it in 2024, with the original three questions, but this year she restarted the series with new questions. In a way, they amount to the same thing, but there is a different twist, so I took up her offer and had second bite of the cherry. The questions did challenge me a little, because I kept returning to books and authors I’d selected first time round. How boring am I? However, of course, my reading is more diverse than that, and I did come up with new books.

Kim has now posted my Mark II selections, and you can find them here.

Thanks for the challenge, Kim, I enjoyed it. And folks, if you don’t see responses from me in the next little while (and over the past few days) it’s because I’m in the wilds of northern Queensland with very minimal Internet reception. It might be a few days before I’m back in Internet civilisation again.

A year before I started this blog, Melbourne was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature, something I briefly mentioned in a 2010 post on the Victorian Literary Map. The City of Literature program is part of UNESCO’s wider Creative Cities Network which was launched in 2004, and which itself grew out of UNESCO’s 2002 Global Alliance for Cultural Diversity initiative. According to the Cities of Literature website, the Creative Cities Network encompasses seven creative fields: Crafts & Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Music, and Media Arts. Currently there are 53 Cities of Literature, across 39 countries in 6 continents.

Edinburgh was the first City announced in 2004, with Melbourne becoming the second in 2008. Iowa City was also designated that year. Since then 50 more have been added with a second Australian city, Hobart, being among the most recent added to the list, in 2023. The full list is available online at the Cities of Literature website.

What does it mean, and how does a city become a City of Literature? To start with, it is up to cities to apply to be so designated. Once they apply, they are assessed against a number of criteria. These criteria 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.

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.

It then lists other facts and figures about Melbourne’s literary credentials.

Hobart’s (nipaluna) page doesn’t seem to exist yet … But its page on the specific Cities of Literature site starts with the state’s First Nations people:

Lutruwita/Tasmania has a strong arts and culture presence, especially around nipaluna/Hobart. Over time, an authentic Tasmanian voice has developed in our literature and storytelling. The Tasmanian Aboriginal community drew on their knowledge, history, resilience and creativity to retrieve and revive their language, palawa kani, a composite of Lutruwita’s original Aboriginal languages. This has seen this island’s First People’s interpreting their own stories in their own language.

Today, nipaluna/Hobart is home to a multitude of award-winning and best-selling authors who have been recognised both nationally and internationally, winning awards such as the Vogel Award, Stella Prize, Commonwealth Writers Prize, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and the Booker Prize. From self-published authors to Richard Flanagan, winner of the Booker Prize, Hobartians have taken this special place to readers on every continent. 

Although nipaluna/Hobart was designated in late 2023, it’s at this year’s Hobart Litfest, which is running now (from 3 to 12 April), that they are celebrating the city’s designation, with the litfest’s theme being “Celebrate Hobart’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature at Hobart LitFest!” If you’d like to check out the program, click here.

Meanwhile, the opening event featured a keynote speech by author Peter Timms in which the promotion said he would focus on how Hobart became a City of Literature & how Hobart sits against other global cities. He also, according to the promotion, was going to “delve” into Hobart’s “rich literary history, cultural influences, and key milestones” that shaped the city’s identity in the literary world, and also identify what sets Hobart apart and what it can learn from the successes of the other cities. My brother attended the keynote and reported (in comments on last week’s Monday Musings) that “he spoke about needing a regular writers’ festival (which we haven’t really had since the 1990s, if ever), support for writers through re-funding a Tasmanian Writers’ Centre and highlighted the foundation and development of the Wheeler Centre by the Victorian State Library to build on Melbourne’s declaration as a City of Literature”. I love it when people offer good, clear and aspirational but also achievable ideas.

Anyhow, do you live in a UNESCO City of Literature? Or one of the other creative cities? What do you think about the concept?

Last week, the winner of Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize was announced, Laura Jones for her portrait of Tim Winton.

Winton, as I read in the Herald’s The Booklist email, is the first novelist to be the subject of an Archibald Prize-winning portrait in more than two decades, with Geoffrey Dyer’s portrait of Richard Flanagan being the previous one in 2003. The email’s author, Melanie Kembrey, adds other Australian writers who have been the subject of prize-winning portraits include George Johnston (1969, Ray Crooke); Patrick White (1962, Louis Kahan); Banjo Patterson (1935, John Longstaff); and Ambrose Pratt (1933, Charles Wheeler). The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has other portraits of writers, including Murray Bail (1980-1981, Fred Williams); Peter Carey (a few, including 2000, Bruce Armstrong); Robert Dessaix (a couple, including the one I know best, 1998, Robert Hannaford AM); Helen Garner (of whom there are many, including 2003, Jenny Sages); the poet Dame Mary Gilmore (c. 1938, Lyall Trindall); Elizabeth Jolley (2003, Mary Moore); Thomas Keneally (1987, Bernd Heinrich); Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) (1965, Clif Peir). Writers, like many people in the public eye, are popular portrait subjects, so I’ll stop here!

Kembrey then writes that “just as painters are interested in novelists, so novelists are in painters” and she lists some of her favourite “(more recent) novels about art and artists” – Alex Miller’s The sitters (1995); Peter Carey’s Theft (read before blogging); Emily Bitto’s The strays (my review). Kembrey also names some non-Australian novels but as you know by now, my Monday Musings is Australian-focused. Oh, just to be clear, we are talking visual art/artists, here, not artist in its wider meaning of any creative person).

Kembrey’s little list is just that, a little list to whet the appetite, but there are many more, including these (in alphabetical order by author):

Miles Allinson’s Fever of animals (2015): about a man’s search to solve the mystery of a Romanian surrealist, who had disappeared decades before, but the search brings up issues from his own life.

Jen Craig’s Wall (2023): about a woman who returns to Australia to clear out her father’s house, aiming to turn the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the Chinese artist Song Dong, but gets caught up family tensions.

Julian Davies’ Crow mellow (2014) (my review): a satirical (and illustrated) house party novel about a group of artists staying in a country house/bush retreat with their patrons and admirers; explores the complex relationship between art, its practitioners and followers, and life.

Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair series, starting with A few right thinking men (2010): Gentill explained during last week’s conversation that she made her protagonist, Rowland Sinclair, an artist, because an artist, particularly back in the 1930s, was a good profession for a character who needed to be able to move through different strata of society.

Gail Jones’ Salonika burning (2022) (my review): draws on the lives of four real people, including British artists Grace Pailthorpe and Stanley Spencer, to explore the experience of war, and, among other things, the idea of witness and representation. (Gail Jones often features art and artists in her novels, including her Miles Franklin award-winning The death of Noah Glass.)

Silvia Kwon’s Vincent and Sien (2023): based on the eighteen months or so that Vincent van Gogh and Sien Hoornik were together.

William Lane’s The salamanders (2016) (my review): about events triggered by an obsessive artist father; “a broad, abstract story about our relationship to art, place and nature, and a more personal story about identity and family”.

Alex Miller’s Prochownik’s dream (2005): “reveals the inner life of an artist, torn between his obsession with his art and his love of his wife and daughter” (Readings). (Like Jones, Miller often features artists, another novel being Autumn Laing).

Ruby J. Murray, The biographer’s lover (2018): about a young writer who is hired to write about the life of an unknown woman artist in a family’s quest to bring her to public attention, and the complex issues re fame, art, memory, that arise. (Readings)

Angela O’Keeffe’s The sitter (2023) (Brona’s review): inspired by Hortense Cézanne, wife of artist Paul Cézanne, who sat for twenty-nine of his paintings, and a writer who is writing about her; another exploration of the tension between artist and subject, art and life.

Edwina Preston’s Bad art mother (2022) (my review): the protagonist is a poet, but two other women feature, a muralist and an ikebana artist; about how hard it is hard for women to make art and be recognised for it, and especially hard for woman who are mothers.

Heather Rose’s The museum of modern love (2016) (my review): inspired by Marina Abramović and her performance piece, The artist is present, exploring, as I suggested in my review, the question of whether art is enough or is love more important? 

Dominic Smith’s The last painting of Sara de Vos (2016) (kimbofo’s review): a multi-pronged story spanning three centuries that “shines a light both on the hidden world of art forgery and women’s unrecognised contributions to the Dutch Golden Age”.

Patrick White’s The vivisector (1970): life story of a fictional artist/painter Hurtle Duffield; “explores universal themes like the suffering of the artist, the need for truth and the meaning of existence”. (Wikipedia)

Chris Womersley’s Cairo (2015): set in a bohemian world peopled by painters and poets, and explores deception and betrayal, within the context of one of the greatest unsolved art heists of the twentieth century, the infamous theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman. (Readings)

So many novels, most from this century. Like Kembrey, I’ve barely touched the surface.

Some of these novels reference known artists, while others imagine their artists, but the question is, why do novelists choose to write about artists, real or otherwise? Chris Hammer said (in the abovelinked conversation with Sulari Gentill) that if you have 12 authors in a room, you’ll have 14 ways of doing things. This probably also works as an answer to my question here, but we can glean some recurring threads. A common one concerns the (often difficult) artist and his or her relationships (with partners, children, and others), alongside some sort of exploration of what price art in a wider life. There are many variations on this theme, because art is a rich vehicle for examining how we express ourselves and find meaning, how the all-consuming drive to create can become exploitative, how we balance our inner selves with the reality of existence, and so on. Another common theme is the feminist one of retrieving known women artists or muses from their undervalued or misrepresented place in history and/or exploring that challenges women artists face in practising their art.

Have you read any of these? Do you like novels about artists, and do you have any favourites?