Tag: Southerly

Entries now open for the David Harold Tribe Fiction Prize and the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for 2019

The Department of English at the University of Sydney is pleased to invite entries for two literary awards, made possible through generous bequests to the University. The Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2019 This is the third biennial award made under the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest. The award is open to Australian women poets over the age of 18, for an unpublished full-length poetry manuscript of 50-80 pages. The winner will receive $7000 and publication of their manuscript with Vagabond Press. Judges: Pam Brown, Fiona Hile and Kate Lilley. The David Harold Tribe Fiction Prize 2019 This award has been made…

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Nicholas Birns reviews ‘Australian Books and Others in the American Marketplace’ by David Carter and Roger Osborne

David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace: 1840s to 1940s. University of Sydney Press 2018, xii + 366 pp ISBN 9781743325797 RRP $50.00 David Carter and Roger Osborne’s volume looks at publishing history as a form of literary history. The authors’ proficiency in the archive and their thoroughness of research tells a story of both the splendors and, far more, the miseries of the reception of Australian books in the United States, The book is like a detective story (appropriately, the authors mention mystery writers Fergus Hume and Arthur Upfield as major Australian exports).…

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Podcast: Pynchonesque Debut Fiction || Sisters of No Mercy by Vincent Silk

Sisters of No Mercy is a Pynchonesque odyssey from a fresh new voice in Australian literature. In this podcast, Silk talks about representations of reality in fiction, the writing process, and how to survive these days as an emerging writer. Mega-storm Martha has wreaked havoc and it’s harder than ever to find a home. Hapless Pinky, Del – mother-hen and mentor – and the ever-resourceful and sometime sleuth Almond are members of Sisters of No Mercy. A band of vigilantes, a pack of thieves or a new wave commune, this underground network has a fresh target: heir to a mining fortune and…

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May Monthly Blogger – Moreno Giovannoni

Moreno Giovannoni emigrated from Italy at the age of two. He grew up in north-east Victoria but left his heart in San Ginese where he was born. A translator and writer who has been published in The Age, Island and Southerly, he was the 2015 inaugural winner of the Deborah Cass Prize and is currently writing The Sweet Life set among the Italian Community in North-East Victoria in the 1960s. Black Inc will publish his Tales from San Ginese in 2018.

Caravan to Yale – A Tjindarella Story

by Natalie Harkin I am above the clouds, floating on my contemplations and looking for patterns and remnant bush in cleared and carved-up landscapes.  I’ve just parted ways with my friend and fellow poet at the Adelaide airport – she to Sydney and me to Canberra, each for work.  We talked briefly about this blog, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the way her work has been represented in the mainstream media when news of her literary Prize went viral. The March 2017 announcement for the Windham-Campbell Prize, administered by Yale University in the US, was truly sensational.  It…

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My ‘Avant-Garde Card’: Five Aesthetic Categories

by A.J. Carruthers ―For Pam B., Michael B., Fiona H. & Justin C.  In this final blog post I want us to all get making. To get into the spirit of active experimentation, I want to share some personal writing practices here in the form of five achievable aesthetic categories: stale, flat, daggy, austere, and vaporous. These “categories” are also primers for writing. At the end of each section there are exercises to try. To speak about aesthetic categories in poetry is to issue a pragmatics of the experimental writing process. These primers are pragmatic and constructivist. Sianne Ngai, in introducing…

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The Australian Neo-Avant-Garde: Beginnings, 1973-1992

by A.J. Carruthers   It is imperative that studies of the neo-avant-garde in Australia, and I think avant-garde studies in general, strike a balance between theory and history. One cannot just have a history of the avant-garde: a slew of good examples without a theory of what it is that makes these examples avant-garde (and in poetry, to catalogue an exhibit of key works without interrogating their poetics and aesthetics). Neither can one simply have a theory of the avant-garde that doesn’t take into account its specific histories, especially transcultural avant-gardes, those outside centres of cultural influence, those that cross…

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Australian Experimental Poetry: Critical and Historical Perspectives

by A.J. Carruthers These blog posts will contain some critical explorations, reflections and polemics concerning my second book project titled The Languages of Invention: Australian Experimental Poetry and Literary History, 1973-2014. This project comes after Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011,[i] a book I have called a “critical experiment” which examines the use of notational methods and actual musical scores in expansive works by Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman. These are disruptive and radical case studies, poetries that test our reading practices, oftentimes engaging in trenchant cultural critique through the registers…

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