Articles by Bethanie Blanchard

Beginning as a one-day zine fair in 2004, the Emerging Writers Festival has expanded to ten days of events, workshops, panel discussions and gala nights, as well as digital events using the #ewf13 hashtag — and it all begins next week! I’m very excited to be a part of two events this year: hosting a masterclass [...]

Today, Tony Abbott, like Australia’s own Hannah Horvath, announced the publication of an ebook. Titled The Little Book of Big Labor Waste – invoking perhaps the wildly successful late-90s Little Book of Calm – the Coalition’s new work takes as its theme “60 examples of Labor waste and mismanagement from the Gillard Government,” an ironic inversion of the meditation [...]

There is no question that the debates around gender in literary awards have been important and resulted in real culture change. Yet I feel an uneasiness that it has reached the point where gender has become almost the primary concern in reportage.

Five novels make the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist, and they’re all by female authors

On the release of Chris Somerville’s debut collection of short stories, I interviewed the Brisbane based author on epigraphs, water motifs and placelessness.

The overwhelming experience of being at the awards was female writers and authors supporting one another, and the new national award they had created.

The full Sydney Writers’ Festival program has just been released and new Director Jemma Birrell has curated a wonderful line up. As well as showcasing our incredible Australian writers and authors, I’m particularly excited about the international guests coming out — such as Diego Marani, Anis Mojgani, Naomi Wolf, James Wood, Karl Ove Knausgaard, even [...]

Krissy Kneen’s new novel Steeplechase is a claustrophobic, unsettling story of two sisters linked by art and madness. It is also her first non-erotic work. Before the Melbourne launch of the novel at Readings tonight, I interviewed Kneen on the line between erotic and non-erotic literature, equine metaphors, and her fascination with the taboo.

“Usually when people say they want to be a writer, they really don’t want to do anything except eat and masturbate.” – Ray. The second season of HBO’s Girls has been consistently amusing in its representation of the experience of life as a writer. Though the series has again provoked debates about sex (and, this season, [...]

This year the Miles Franklin longlist was released via a slow literary striptease from the Trust Company – revealing, one twitpic at a time, the covers of the ten novels. And what an interesting longlist it is. Not only decidedly free from the controversy that plagued it in 2009 and 2011 following all-male shortlists that saw [...]

It’s an all-fiction shortlist for the inaugural Stella Prize, Australia’s first major new literary award for women’s writing that aims to “celebrate women’s contributions to Australian literature.” Six works make it to the list, down from a longlist of twelve. While all are fiction, there is a variety of genres — with a collection of short [...]

The longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize, was announced today in the UK. The prize is an international award for women’s writing in English, that aims to celebrate “the very best full length fiction written by women throughout the world.” Telecommunications company Orange, who worked in developing and [...]

Fiction, debut writers and independent publishers are the emphasis in the longlist announced today for the inaugural Stella Prize, the first major new literary award for women’s writing. The Stella Prize is an exciting new fixture on the awards calendar and is the most high-profile example of what has been, in many ways, a culture [...]

When Christopher Bantick’s opinion piece appeared in The Age on Thursday, criticising the inclusion of Gabriel García Márquez’s classic Love in the Time of Cholera on the VCE syllabus, it was easy enough to laugh off as the opinion of a senior Literature teacher demonstrating why they should perhaps retire. The article garnered much attention, [...]

– This review appears in the December edition of ABC’s Limelight magazine. In the opening pages of The Satanic Verses, protagonists Gibreel and Saladin tumble and fall from the sky in a chaos of fire and debris. When the novel was published in late 1988, it too burst forth with an explosion of protests, riots, [...]