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 on The Business of Being a Writer, as well as the Signal Express Young Writers’ Program for under 25s on freelance writing and publishing.

Before it all kicks off, I asked new Director Sam Twyford-Moore a few questions about this year’s program.

How was the experience of putting together the program – your first as Director?

It was incredibly exciting. I’ve worked with running events before but never to this size and with this many writers involved. It’s a huge program and hugely ambitious – but that’s Emerging Writers’ Festival. It’s been interesting to come in as Director for the tenth festival also, because it’s an occasion to celebrate and there was a need to honour the festival too, so we’re bringing back a lot of festival favourites and really engaging with our alumni from the last ten years – Rebecca Giggs, Jeff Waters, Jennifer Mills, Benjamin Law are returning, but there a lot of new names too.

EWF has a noted emphasis on digital spaces and social media, how will the festival unfold online this year?

This year we’re launching our first ever storytelling app, ‘The Unfinished Phrase’, which is part exquisite corpse, part Twitter aggregator – we’ve decided to launch it at the end of the festival so there’s something people can use to carry on the conversations they’ve had during the festival. Just because the festival is over doesn’t mean the writing stops. We’re also busy working on a Digital Showbag, which I can’t say too much about, but I think is going to be very exciting.

The title of the program launch this year was ‘The Discomfort Zone.’ Why did you choose this theme?

The Discomfort Zone was an attempt to get writers to challenge themselves, to write outside of their normal genre. So we had comedian Luke Ryan reading a very serious sci-fi story (actually a manuscript he had written when he was fourteen called Love Shall Sustain Me), the acclaimed novelist Toni Jordan writing poetry for the first time ever, graphic novelist Nicki Greenberg writing a cookbook and, my personal favourite in terms of discomfort, the childrens and young adult writer Andrew McDonald writing erotica. The whole point of this, while very funny, was to show writers that some of their most creative work will come when they test their limits.

Which events are you most excited about?

I’m really excited about the keynote by Astrid Lorange on opening night and the Sweatshop Stories event, which has been made possible by the support of the University of Western Sydney. We’re bringing seven writers down from the Sweatshop Collective, who are just the most dynamic and interesting collection of writers in this country. I mean, this was the description for the event they sent me: “Welcome to the sweatshops of Western Sydney, where every Aussie gets a fair go. Pockets are full and guns are empty. There are no racists here. No misogynists and no homophobes. Where the Wogs rule and the Anglos have assimilated.” It’s got me interested.

The Writers’ Conference is always hugely popular and is the place to go to get the most up to date conversations about writing. Emerging Q&A returns bigger and better than ever, with Benjamin Law doing his best Tony Jones impression as host. Turn The Music Up Loud is our chance to rock out – with Dave Graney and Angie Hart – talking about their work in both music and writing and how one might inform the other, that’s going to be a terrifically exciting night.

You’ve added several masterclasses this year – tell me about this addition to the program.

EWF has always tried to cater for as many kinds of writers as possible, and to capture as many genres. It’s a tall order, but we’ve managed to do it this year through some really exciting new partnerships with Poetry Australia, MTC, ACMI and VCA – who are all supporting us to expand the workshop program. Our event at ACMI is particularly exciting, with three screenwriters presenting parts of their work and then discussing them. I don’t know if popcorn will be available, but it’s really exciting that EWF is going to the movies!

One of the smaller workshops is just focusing on performing and presenting your work aloud – writing is increasingly being associated with public speaking, with either a performance element expected, or the writer being expected to front up as a public intellectual. I mean this is what the Writers’ Festivals are asking writers, but I don’t think writers are getting enough support to do this – we’re expecting them to show up and just be ready, but they don’t have training in this. So the performance workshop is definitely there to think about that.

This year’s line up includes an Abbottsford Convent program on the second weekend of the festival.  How did the idea come about for a second intensive weekend in addition to the Town Hall writers conference?

This grew pretty naturally soon after I came in as Director and was sort of the first big decision in programming. I wanted to provide a bit of a peaceful space for writers in the second weekend after the intensity of the Writers Conference and I also wanted to try and move the festival out of the Melbourne CBD for part of the festival, and see if we could travel. The Abbotsford Convent were really receptive to the idea of us coming out there, and so the programming kind of came out of responding to those beautiful spaces and grounds. There’s nothing like it and we’re so excited to be there. The wellbeing focus grew out of that, but also thinking about what support writers need. We’ve been great at providing professional development, but for me that’s only one part of the writing life. I wanted to kind of investigate some strategies for keeping writers healthy – mentally and physically – and so I think we’ve come up with a very unique program quite unlike what you would normally expect from a writers festival. I mean, I can’t wait to see what people think of the writing and yoga workshop.

You’ve got a session to welcome interstate guests — why did you feel this was important?

I’m originally from Sydney and I came down to the last two festivals, and you know, it’s a very long way to come. It’s really a big investment in their writing careers and I want to recognise the contribution that interstate guests make by attending the festival – they’re incredibly important to us and we want to make sure that we’re supporting them during their stay.

Melbourne isn’t a difficult place to get to know, but we want to have information ready about the location of our events for interstaters – we’re really spreading our reach this year and want to make it as easy to get around as possible. It’d be great if we could have some very simple instructions on Mykis!

The festival is being launched this year by Astrid Lorange — tell me about her work. 

Astrid is just amazing. She lives and breathes writing in this incredibly embodied way and I really wanted to put her in front of a big audience. Her biography in the program kind of captures it all, “Poet, researcher, teacher, essayist, home brewer, band member, small press aspirant, part-time book indexer, relational enthusiast.” She also gets the idea that emerging isn’t a funding category, it’s a state of being – and in creative practice the best state to be in. I’ve no doubt that her keynote will reflect this looking at the next ten years of writing in Australia, because Australia is emerging in this really interesting way on a planetary stage, and – no pressure on Astrid – but I think it’s really going to help the Emerging Writers’ Festival and emerging writers think about the next ten years.

– The Emerging Writers’ Festival runs from May 23rd to June 2nd in Melbourne. You can view the full listing of events here. 

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 book.

From Quarterly Essays to manifestos, to memoirs or exposés, there’s a long and proud tradition of politicians as authors. But the Little Book of Big Labor Waste is less a “book” than a series of numbered, brightly coloured Power Point slides. Perhaps crippled by writers block or ennui, TLBOBLW gives us a sweeping overview rather than extended prose or analysis. The text, with a foreward by Jamie Briggs, takes us on a journey from a $6.6 billion “Immigration budget blow out,” to $2.4 million spent on “Public servants receiving advice on ‘getting a good night’s sleep,’” but has the sort of reliance on newspaper clippings that brings to mind a scene from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind.

This isn’t Abbott’s first foray into the self-publishing scene. Last year the opposition leader released his debut ebook, A Strong Australia In 2012, a collection of the major speeches he delivered during that year. Yet, after the lofty heights of his political manifesto Battlelines, published by no lesser publishing house than Melbourne University Press, it seems odd indeed that Abbott has found such a happy home in the world of self publishing.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful union between Liberal politicians and the indie lit scene. I hope tonight Abbott and co. are in a small bar or independent bookstore, drinking cheap red wine and listening to some Rinehart performance poetry while they wait for the reviews.

Giving voice to what is in the hearts and minds of all Australians, Abbott claimed in his launch speech today, “The sixty examples of profligacy in this book exemplify the kind of mismanagement that this government has been responsible for over the last five years.” A worthy contribution perhaps, but one that doesn’t exactly scream bestseller. If you want to capture the public’s imagination, try something with s&m or vampires.

Minutes after finishing High Sobriety – Jill Stark’s memoir about her year without alcohol – I attended a birthday party…for a bar. I literally put the book down, got dressed up and ran out the door to celebrate the liquor loving life.

In the past, this obvious irony would have been useful fodder for some social stand up: bringing a cigarette to my lips, I could have condemned the boring sober life with a Patsy and Eddie style tirade, swilling (and spilling) my giant cocktail before throwing Stark’s book onto a fire fuelled by ethanol (that I was also sipping). But I opted out of a self-depreciating routine because this wasn’t a high point for me.

On the way to the party, with High Sobriety at the forefront of my mind, I found myself freshly inspired to reattempt Febfast. My initial effort to spend a month sober had been dismal; I didn’t even take a seat on the wagon before jumping off after a single day. I felt so guilty that every drink I guzzled that month was accompanied by some kind of justification as a chaser (“It’s summer!” “It’s a wedding!” “It’s 3.30pm!” “I’m miserable!”).

After reading High Sobriety there were no excuses: I was 300-pages more aware of alcohol related statistics and (frightening) facts to corroborate the niggling sensation that I should cut back on drinking.  Armed with Stark’s reassuring and relatable anecdotes of being sober-and-social – and the mantra “If Jill can do it, I can too” – it felt like the perfect time to curb my liquor-based enthusiasm.

I wasn’t optimistic (or naïve) enough to believe that I could go cold turkey that particular night. It was a party for a bar – there would be a drink waiting for me on a silver platter. So, in an effort to back away from the Bacchanal, I decided that moderation was the key. But as moderation gave way to temptation, I soon found myself clutching the giant novelty key as mayor of Party Town once more. Alcohol was everywhere: I downed drinks that were mixed, straight up, free or stolen (yep). I definitely had some fun but the flipside of this tippled two-faced coin is that the fun led to questionable decisions, blurry D&Ms, lost memories, a horrific three-day hangover and weeks of self-flagellating shame.

I had just finished reading about the benefits of curtailing these inebriated experiences. Mere hours before getting on it, I had felt inspired to get off it. What happened? Fortunately for Stark this was less about the book’s message and more about my own habits, lack of willpower and socially anxious state.

I am, 100%, the target market for High Sobriety: a social twentysomething with a long (and at times shameful) relationship with drinking. Even the cover – a pop art inspired graphic, appealing pallet and (importantly) fabulous font – looks like something I’d want to eyeball.

Before my pathetic Febfast failure, I’d been considering abstaining for a while to test myself, acknowledge my triggers and observe life without beer goggles or Dutch courage (which, despite my surname, does not come naturally). But it was a difficult habit to shake. I had relied on alcohol as a crutch to pacify my social anxiety for years: it was my oldest, nearest and dearest frienemy.

I definitely have a love/hate relationship with “the demon drink”. The love portion is publically declared as it fosters a sense of camaraderie (apologies for the bad beer pun). The hate element is dark and personal; a bleak liquor-soaked battle with my mind that is shared only with besties or boyfriends, those few with intimate insight into the sadder parts of my cyclical life routine. Susceptible to the booze blues, I would wallow, continually asking myself whether the memories (if I had any) were really worth the instability and pain that followed a night out. But I wouldn’t do anything about this bad habit. However after this particular night out, after this book, I decided enough was enough: it was time to get off the binge-cringe train.

Interestingly, this is how Stark’s 12-month journey kicks off: with a killer hangover that bears down physically and mentally. Stark also touches upon her own socially anxious fears and considers various drinking related cases from medical experts to teenage drinkers to addicts, in similar and far more serious situations.

My own reflection comes as I approach thirty. Increasingly, I have noticed my peers starting to question their drinking habits too. In my friendship circles, binge drinking as a social activity is being relegated in importance; people seem increasingly eager to participate in the likes of Dry July as a group or independently, challenging themselves to month-long detoxes in an effort to get their shit together.

It’s beginning to feel like “late-twenties / early-thirties abstinence” can be added to the other alcohol related rites of passage: your first stumbling steps as a teen, that morphs into bored in the suburbs binging (Scotland in Stark’s case); the Uni-party life which soon becomes the engrained after work drinks norm. Now, as we settle into our careers and reflect on how happy or unhappy we are, taking control of binge drinking habits – and its financially, physically and mentally debilitating effects – is becoming common.

It’s not an all out straight-edge revolution by any means, nor is it the Gen-Y revitalisation of the temperance movement, but High Sobriety was clearly commissioned at an opportune time as attitudes are beginning to shift. The likes of Hello Sunday Morning (a blog Stark wholeheartedly supports) and High Sobriety contribute to the growing dialogue around not drinking. Both drinking and not drinking create their own ‘war stories’; tales about abstaining are entertainingly related, contributing to an increasing communal dialogue.

This dichotomy – between drinking and not drinking – alone proves how engrained alcohol is in our lives. To discuss our local (and at times the international) drinking culture implicitly announces many topics as it affects questions of identity, health, politics, business and economics. Accordingly, Stark explores these issues personally (from fears of social exclusion, to family experiences and dating concerns) and culturally, through her relationship with Australia and Scotland (and the relevant national identities and myths founded on booze).

Stark casts her net wide, lightly touching upon a range of ideas that these themes and this subject evokes (even including a brief discussion on drinking and writing/creativity, a topic I find particularly intriguing). The stats are sobering and informative, the stories cheeky and light; High Sobriety isn’t particularly heavy or in-depth, it’s accessible pop reporting.

That said, Stark’s text does finish on a particularly emotional and personal note: what could be seen as a digression from the central topic does retrospectively inform the preceding chapters because while journalistic, it is memoir. The final message appeals to my carpe diem desires; I don’t want to waste the day getting wasted. So here goes nothing.

– Stephanie Van Schilt is Deputy Editor of The Lifted Brow, Online Editorial Assistant with Kill Your Darlings and a freelance writer. She’s been published in Junkee, Cineaste and Killings. Follow her on twitter @steph_adele.

– Jill Stark’s High Sobriety is available now through Scribe. RRP 29.95

When the Stella Prize was being founded I remember listening to the debates surrounding the naming of the award. The prize was in some ways emulating what was then still known as the Orange Prize in the UK, and people bandied about humorous names such as the ‘Mango’ for our antipodean version. Stella was ultimately chosen because it was a reclamation of the first name of Miles Franklin. ‘Miles’ was a name adopted by the author, like so many female writers before her, to disguise the fact of her gender. To give the new all-female literary award Franklin’s true first name was an appropriate mirroring of the purpose of the award itself – a reclamation of a prize which had gone to male authors far too many times since its founding in 1957.

It’s hard not to see a rivalry between the two prizes now, with the Miles Franklin clearly on the back foot since the accusations of gender bias.

The prize money for the Stella is $50,000. Such an amount would have been identical to that of the Miles – a deliberate choice to put the Stella on an equal footing, achieving the equivalent prestige and equally rewarding its winner. But the Miles Franklin’s Trust Company this year increased their prize to $60,000, in what is difficult not to regard as an attempt to remain on top.

There’s been some incestuousness between the awards too, with Romy Ash’s Floundering
, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel and Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds appearing on both the Stella and Miles Franklin longlists. There is no doubt that this year has been a strong year for female writing. Yet, in their announcement of the longlist last month, the Trust Company emphasised the fact that it was dominated by females, claiming that while half the original list of 73 submissions were written by women, this year’s longlist “sees the largest number of female authors selected since the longlist was first introduced in 2005.”

Today, as if to put the final nail in the coffin of any further accusations, we have an all-female shortlist for the first time in the prize’s history.

The gender issue has been a persistent theme in the announcement of shortlists and longlists over the last few years. Commentators such as myself have had to tally up the score of men vs women upon every announcement, and you can see it in the reporting of the shortlist of almost every publication covering it today (my own just a further instance of the tend). 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.

The Stella Prize has a strange ultimate aim: happy obsolescence. With this year’s Miles Franklin lists we’re on our first step there. Perhaps there will ultimately be a melding of the Miles Franklin with the Stella, one day the two versions of her self will be put back together again and she will regain her full name.

But Stella Maria Miles Franklin left a legacy greater than her name or her gender – in founding the award, her stated aim was to reward the novel “which is of the highest literary merit” and which “present[s] Australian Life in any of its phases.” Last year, there was an expansion of the selection criteria, with the judging panel allowed to “use their discretion to modernise the interpretation of Australian life beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values.” The Stella Prize is a wonderful expansion of this project too – recognising not just novels but children’s fiction, verse novels, non-fiction and short stories.

The 2013 Miles Franklin Award, we now know, will be won by a female author as it was in 2012. This year’s shortlist – Romy Ash’s Floundering
, Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, Annah Faulkner’s The Beloved, Drusilla Modjeska’s The Mountain and Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds – is a recognition of the writing of women as significant and a testament to the talents of these female authors. The debates and controversies of the last few years have made judges and readers aware perhaps of unconscious biases, and let’s hope such self-reflection continues. But discussions should focus far more strongly on the richness of literary merit of each of the titles. Politics and aesthetics — to employ a great phrase Martin Shaw used today — always play a part in judging decisions. There’s been a huge positive focus on the former lately, let’s move our attention once again to the latter.

—

* our own version of the VIDA survey conducted by Bookseller + Publisher last year shows that inequality in writing extends beyond just literary prizes.

The shortlist for the Miles Franklin, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, has been announced today at the State Library of NSW and it’s a list devoid of either of the two male authors that made the longlist: Brian Castro and former (double) Miles Franklin winner Tom Keneally.

The all-female shortlist includes several Stella Prize longlisted authors: Romy Ash, Michelle de Kretser, as well as Carrie Tiffany who took out the Stella Prize earlier this month. Tiffany is now in contention to win two major national literary awards for her novel Mateship with Birds.

It’s a list that also supports first time novelists, with over half the shortlist made up of debut works by Romy Ash, Annah Faulkner and Drusilla Modjeska.

The five shortlisted titles are:

• Romy Ash – Floundering
 (Text)
• Michelle de Kretser – Questions of Travel 
(A&U)
• Annah Faulkner – The Beloved 
(Picador)
• Drusilla Modjeska – The Mountain 
(Vintage)
• Carrie Tiffany – Mateship with Birds 
(Picador)

Last year, the prize was won by Anna Funder for All That I Am.

The winner of the $60,000 prize (increased this year from the previous $50,000) will be revealed on June 19th 2013.

“He thought of a drawing class he’d done a few years back where they’d sat at their easels in a loose circle around a girl and been instructed that, instead of drawing the model, they had to draw the space around her body, the white negative that her body cut out of the room.” Chris Somerville’s debut We Are Not The Same Anymore focuses on the spaces cut out of lives and rooms and relationships once people have left. A collection of short stories of usually single characters encountering small moments of failure or loss.

The title of Somerville’s collection is from a story in which a man’s brother has just been broken up with, “The note read, in pencil We are not the same anymore, and even though Beckman knew the other side was blank, he flipped the paper over to see if there was anything more to the message.”

Somerville has a spare, intimate prose style that contrasts against the quirky, strange, and often very funny situations he conjures. He has a way of writing contradictory but immediately recognisable flashes of feeling — as in ‘Aquarium’ where a man visits his daughter’s birthday party at the house he used to share with his ex and stands in the renovated study, “I thought I could still smell the paint cans I used to store in here, but maybe I was glumly imagining it the way amputees sometimes feel their missing limbs.” Or ‘Travelling through the air’ where a character is “overwhelmed by the kind of sentimentality he’d been spending most of the semester trying to eradicate from his student’s work.”

On the release of his debut collection, I interviewed Somerville on epigraphs, water motifs and placelessness.

There’s a resurgence of exciting short story writers being published at the moment – your publisher UQP in particular is releasing lots of beautiful collections by new Australian writers. What draws you to the short story as a form?

I think I’ve always liked that you’re forced to whittle down the story to its essentials, and that every line then has to do something. I read a lot more collections of short stories than novels too, though I’m trying to amend this a little bit this year. Writing short stories also always seemed like the thing you do first, before you write a novel, though maybe that’s not the case so much anymore.

Your stories have a deliberate unmoored, placeless quality – you often write ‘no-places’ such as planes, cars, hotel rooms, and people who are in houses that are either empty or not their own. What is it about these settings that you like to explore? 

I’m not sure. I’ve never had the greatest imagination, I don’t think, and I tend to get a little bit obsessed with playing over the same situation again and again. For the time I was also interested in these sorts of situations too.

Water seems to be the unifying motif in this collection, it is present in one way or another in almost every story. Tell me about how this came to play such an important role.

This is definitely one of the things I didn’t notice about my book until after it was done. When I first wrote this book there were almost double the amount of stories, which I then edited and so forth, and added a few new stories in there too, so the book more took shape by what I threw out rather than deciding what I was going to put in there, if that makes sense.

Anyway the best I can say about water is that, growing up in Hobart, I didn’t learn to swim well until I was a teenager, and I’ve always been kind of apprehensive about the stuff.

I loved the epigraph to the collection by Sydney writer / campaigner Marian Waller: “I wish simply to record that right now life is madly good and please note that this is not at all what I had come to expect.” How did you come across this quote and in what ways do you feel it speaks to the collection?

Marian was my uncle’s partner for many years and was probably the first writer I ever knew. She wrote a kid’s book called the Leaping Llama Carpet, which is now unfortunately out of print, and then turned to poetry after that, I think she said she found it less exhausting. She unfortunately passed away from cancer last year, which she’d had for a long time.

So I always figured I’d use one of her lines, also it seemed to fit, or at least I thought it fit, and I wanted the book to start on a slightly optimistic note, since a lot of the stories are a downer, for the most part.

Much of the collection feels unified but there are two stories that stand out as really unusual stylistically – ‘Loss’ and ‘Drowning Man’ – did you approach the writing of these differently?

No really, since I didn’t really have a unified approach for the rest of them. Both of these stories – and also Room – are three of the earliest ones though, and I wrote them when I was at university. I think ‘Drowning Man’ was always going to be at the end, because it felt both pretty strong and also kind of weird – like maybe not set in the same reality as the rest of the book, so I liked how it worked as an ending to the whole book.

There are many moments in these stories that are really funny – parts of ‘Giraffe’ and ‘Sleeping With The Light On’ in particular made me laugh out loud. Do you find that the situations you create and the characters’ reactions to them become humorous when you’re reading them back, or do you set out to write humor into the stories?

I always try to be funny at least a little bit, sometimes it’s planned out and sometimes it isn’t, it just comes out naturally through editing. I think a story being funny and then all of a sudden becoming sad is a pretty effective technique, and is probably a hallmark of all the short stories that I really love. I’m not sure if I’ve done it as successfully as I want to yet, this funny-sad balance, but it’s something to keep aiming for.

Are there projects, or another collection of short stories, that you’re working on?

I’m working on something longer now, it’s about two brothers and a farm filled with sick animals, kind of. I’m not sure if it’ll work out yet, but in my mind it’s a novel. For a while I was reading out parts of it at a book store each month. At the moment I don’t feel like I have the time or energy to write another book of short stories, or at least it doesn’t feel right yet.

– Chris Somerville’s We Are Not The Same Anymore is available now through UQP. RRP 19.95

Last night, amid a packed room at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Carrie Tiffany was awarded the inaugural Stella Prize for her novel Mateship with Birds.

I felt incredibly privileged to be invited to the awards and to stand there amongst so many talented, influential, bookish people – somehow juggling champagne glass, clutch bag and iphone as I live-tweeted the event.

Someone described standing in that room to me last night as “like being on a packed tram,” a particularly apt Melbourne phrase. Zora from Meanjin had a betting pool going, with Lanagan and de Kretser among the favourites. I never heard the odds on Mateship with Birds but Chloe Wilson left $115 richer.

If you were following along on the lively #stellaprize hashtag last night, you already know now about Tiffany’s gracious, inclusive and humble speech, her invitation for all the other nominated authors to join her on stage. You know of her incredibly generous offer to donate $10,000 of her $50,000 prize money to be split amongst the shortlisted authors – Courtney Collins, Michelle de Kretser, Lisa Jacobson, Cate Kennedy, and Margo Lanagan – because “for a writer, money buys time and if I can hasten their work, why wouldn’t I?”

The homepages of my favourite sites have been filled all morning with reports and stats from the awards, but I wanted to give a sense here of the night as someone lucky enough to have been in the room.

In her funny, honest speech Helen Garner spoke of the way “prizes are rather like wills, they provoke in people the most appalling behaviour,” and in my time attending awards nights, I’ve felt rooms go cold with envy or old grudges as an author takes to the stage. What was wonderful about the Stella Prize was the warmth in that long, light filled space in the Centre for Contemporary Art. Tiffany was the winner, yet there was a sense in which everyone there, including the shortlisted authors, were simply excited to be a part of and support this wonderful new thing they had created.

Tiffany said of her decision to redistribute some of the prize money among the shortlisted authors, “I’ve experienced tremendous generosity and support from women in Australian publishing and literature; it’s a way of honouring the many rather than the few.’’ This was the overwhelming experience of being at the awards – female writers and authors supporting one another.

It led me to reflect on the supportive group of female writers I know and who were all with me last night, drinking and chatting and tweeting — in particular Angela Meyer, Lisa Dempster, and Estelle Tang who have all inspired and been mentors to me when I was starting out.

“I’m sure there’s some people wanting me to justify the existence of a women’s prize” Garner said, but the prize is past having to justify its existence. It would be nice if we never had to have the Stella in the first place, and it’s a strange thing indeed when a prize’s ultimate goal is happy obsolescence. But for last night, at least, it was wonderful to see highlighted so publicly the wealth of talent, and incredible inclusiveness, of our female writers.

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 Molly Ringwald.

I’ll be covering the festival for Crikey again this year and I’ve been putting together my own festival schedule this morning, so I thought I’d share here a few of my highlights:

Day One

Michelle de Kretser in Conversation

Join Ali Lemer as she speaks with award-winning author Michelle de Kretser about her latest novel Questions of Travel.

Missing in Action, Australia’s Literary Past

Leading Australian literary critic Geordie Williamson discusses his new book The Burning Library with Tegan Bennett Daylight.

Day Two 

Sexism, Australian Style

Anne Summers discusses her new book The Misogyny Factor with Tara Moss.

Places of Darkness and Light – New Australian Fiction

Jesse Blackadder, Mark O’Flynn and Julienne van Loon discuss their latest books.

A Reader’s Guide to Life

Ramona Koval discusses her new memoir and the pleasures of reading with Geordie Williamson.

Day Three

Benjamin Law: Freelance Writing for Magazines

Benjamin Law teaches the fundamental skills needed for writing stories magazine want.

Killing Your Darlings: Intensive editing workshop with Rebecca Starford

Editor and publisher Rebecca Starford teaches you the mechanics of editing and drafting in order to make your manuscript shine.

Michael Brissenden – American Stories of Hope and Anger

Michael Brissenden shares the stories of hope and anger shared by everyday people across America as told in his book American Stories.

Day Four

The Uncommon Reader

James Wood, Geordie Williamson and Jane Gleeson-White talk with Tegan Bennett Daylight about the books that inspire them.

Michelle de Kretser Questions of Travel

Novelist Michelle de Kretser in conversation with The Sydney Morning Herald’s Literary Editor, Susan Wyndham.

Maxine McKew Out of the Trenches

Maxine McKew discusses what went wrong and the current political climate with Margot Saville.

Fan Fiction

Joseph Brennan, Amanda Hayward, Lauren Beukes and David Large talk fan fiction.

Kristie Clements: the Vogue Factor

Ex-Vogue editor Kirstie Clements talks with Tara Moss about the inside of the fashion industry.

Angela Meyer: Blogging for Beginners

An informative workshop on blogging and social media.

By the Book: Ramona Koval with Richard Gill

Richard Gill talks with Ramona Koval about her lifelong love affair with books and reading.

The 21st Century Author

How is technology is changing the role of the author?

The State of Reviews

A discussion about the state of reviews in Australian media.

Anis Mojgani: Spoken Word Artist, Poet

Poetry slam champion Anis Mojgani takes to the stage with his words and rhymes.

Obama, the Digital Campaign

Barack Obama’s Chief Digital Strategist, Joe Rospars, and Stephen Muller, the Obama campaign’s Video Director, offer an overview of how the campaign united and mobilised 13 million online supporters toward a single goal of electing President Obama.

Day Five

A Prize of One’s Own

Introducing the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize and the importance of a prize of one’s own.

Anna Krien: Sex, Power and Sport

Anna Krien’s controversial and fearless Night Games investigates sex, consent, power and the dark side of footy culture.

Why Criticism Matters

What is the state of literary criticism today and why is it so important to have a robust culture of criticism?

Literary Buzz

What it is that makes particular books worldwide phenomenons?

Crafting the Message

Joe Rospars, Neil Lawrence and Mark Textor discuss with Leigh Sales how they mould political messages and reputations.

Are We Changing Sex or is Sex Changing Us?

Naomi Wolf, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Frank Bongiorno and Benjamin Law discuss whether we are more open than ever about sex.

Day Six

Naomi Wolf with Mia Freedman

Naomi Wolf addresses her critics and discusses her new book Vagina.

When a Book Travels

How are Australian books edited and packaged for different markets?

The Misogyny Factor

Anne Summers on the rise of ugly and unprecedented expressions of hatred directed at women at the top.

James Wood the Fun Stuff

James Wood talks to Susan Wyndham about the art of critiquing and The Fun Stuff.

Stella Prize Trivia

An afternoon of trivia and laughs celebrating the writing of Australian women, past and present.

Diego Marani

Do we need language to define ourselves?

Effective Political Storytelling: Stephen Muller

Muller created the President Obama videos that went viral.

Meanjin LetterRips

Meanjin goes head to head with rival Sydney Review of Books in a series of fun, fast-paced literary games.

Day Seven

Destroying the Joint

#Destroythejoint initiator Jane Caro asks panellists to do what women do best: wreak a little more havoc!

MCA Zine Fair

Browse, buy and make zines at the sixth annual MCA Zine Fair.

Stella Stories

The art and importance of telling women’s stories.

Love Letter to Iceland

Hannah Kent talks about Burial Rites, one of this year’s most talked about novels.

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.

Steeplechase is marketed as a departure in your oeuvre – your first novel and first non-erotic work. Did you set out to move away from erotic literature and write a different sort of book with Steeplechase, or was framing the work in this way a decision made by your publishers after the fact?

I have been trying to get my non-erotic novels published for many years. I have another manuscript that keeps getting rewritten and submitted and, like a dog with a bone, I won’t let it go. I am hoping that book (His Father’s Son) will eventually make it into book form too. I really want to have two styles of work, my literary fiction and my erotic fiction and to make sure I have both these different genres in my repertoire.  I really enjoy the erotic writing but the literary fiction is my first love. I find it more challenging to write but really rewarding and I learn so much about myself from the non-erotic work.

You’ve written before, quoting Sontag, that you see Triptych as pornographic literature rather than erotica because “sex is at the centre…subsuming plot and character.” But where do you draw the line between erotic and non-erotic literature? If a work contains sex scenes – as Steeplechase does – can it still be classed as erotic, or should that term only apply to texts written to arouse?

You know I keep forgetting about the sex in Steeplechase. I suppose because the sex was not at the heart of the book I keep forgetting there is sex in it. I am not sure I could write a book that has absolutely no sexuality in it as I experience the world in a very sensual way. The erotic work focuses on sex as a landscape in which the work is set. In Steeplechase the sex is very much the subtext.  I suppose in my head the pornography foregrounds sex in a way that makes plot and character secondary.  In porn it has to be one sex scene after another. I made sure I had no more than three pages between genitals in Triptych. In erotica there can be whole chapters between the sex but there still needs to be an emphasis on sex as the landscape of the work. The literary fiction can have sex in it but that must be the subtext or a lesser part of the book and coming from a natural place that is entirely about character.

I know it is a matter of degrees but I can feel the difference between my work. I know when I am writing porn or erotica or literary fiction. I feel it in my body.  There is always sex but my relationship to it changes in the different forms.

All your works delve into the taboo, and Steeplechase explores it in an alarming and unsettling way. What draws you to examine these themes in your writing?

The hidden has always been more interesting to me than what is on the surface. I remember when I was little my family taught me to draw seeing only the shadows or the negative space, ignoring the object in the picture and focusing on everything around it.  It seemed to shape my whole way of looking at the world. I hear about a murder and I immediately wonder what led that person to commit the murder. What was the backstory? What brings a person to that point? I am always more interested in what is missing from a picture than what is in frame.  I suppose this leads naturally to looking at where individuals draw their personal boundaries and why. Why does one person feel horrified by the idea of being naked in public, yet someone else will streak at a cricket match? What is it we are not seeing?

There is also the fact that there were very particular taboos in my own childhood. I wasn’t allowed to read some books and other parents were fine if their kids read them. These things became my obsession.

The sex in Steeplechase is very different from that of Triptych, with all the doubts, insecurities and concerns about propriety suddenly present. Tell me about the experience of writing in this way – did you approach the process differently?

Triptych was a celebration of pornographic expression. I very consciously wanted the sex to be perverse and yet ethically defend-able. I wanted the sex to be pleasurable, consensual and open. It is about celebrating sex and diversity whilst moving the reader to explore their own personal boundaries and taboos.

In Steeplechase the sex came directly from the characters. My characters were not completely comfortable with their sexuality and this played out in their sex. I’ll bet that if I had followed Emily Reich into her sex life with others it would have been much more free and extreme but that was not the story I was telling. Bec Reich is a bundle of anxieties and her sexuality reflects this.

Writing sex is one of the most difficult things to do well, with authors having to navigate a line between too flowery and too mechanical.  What is considered successful pornographic literature is often very raw, using quite basic anatomical language. I wonder what you think about prizes like the Bad Sex Awards – that appear to punish the very thing that literature is supposed to do, which is to be inventive with language?

Bad sex writing does not necessarily mean it depicts bad sex. Some of the books that have been awarded the Bad Sex Award are actually great writing about bad sex. Sometimes the sex needs to be depicted in an awkward way. I totally love Nicholson Baker’s playful use of pornographic language in The House of Holes. It is so fun and playful and yet if you see it out of context you would be confused by all the cliche’s and oddities. The language just has to be appropriate within the context of the book. It can be as rough or anatomical or awkward as you need. Still, I wouldn’t say no if they awarded me the Bad Sex Award. I would be happy to accept the flight and the dinner and the accommodation in a nice hotel.

Equine images and metaphors are key to Steeplechase. What drew you to this particular animal as the central motif for the work? 

Young girls are often so into horses. It is an animal that seems to represent a young girl’s sexuality. My own sister was horse obsessed for many years and, like Bec, I could never quite understand it. I was more into bugs and sea creatures, but I thought that was pretty uncool at the time and so tried to like horses to be ‘in the club’ with my own sister. I was writing this book about sisters and it wasn’t really falling into place. Something was missing.  Then I woke up at 3am one morning with the story of two sisters playing steeplechase following me out of a dream and I sat down and wrote the story as a short story. It came second in the Josephine Ulrich prize and, a little later, I realised it was the missing link in my own book. I inserted the horse imagery into the story and suddenly it all made sense. Then all those paintings of horses started to haunt my dreams and I knew I had made the right decision.

I’m interested to know why you chose Beijing as the city Emily now resides. What was it about China that you felt would attract her?

I needed to put her in a situation where she couldn’t speak the language. I needed to isolate her culturally with her sister to put them back in the same circumstances as their childhood. Anywhere would have been ok. I wanted to go to Paris just because I wanted to visit Paris, but I didn’t have the money to go there and friends of mine were living in Beijing and said I should go there and visit them so I did. It turned out to be perfect. Much more disorienting than Paris (I have now been to Paris and it wouldn’t have worked as well for the book).  I was sick the whole time I was in Beijing and that turned out to be the perfect research for the book. My fevered experience of that city made so much sense in the narrative.  I also loved that there were so many Australian artists exhibiting in the art district there. I had a friend who worked in the art district and she was pretty inspirational for the book.

Art is central to your writings – Triptych is an erotic reimagining of famous artworks by Rubens and Horkusai – but painting is key to Steeplechase also. Were there particular artworks that inspired your most recent book?

There is a sculpture in MoNA in Tasmania (MoNA is my spiritual home) of a dead horse hanging from a rope. The weight and shape of it is amazing. I kept a postcard of it near my desk while I was writing. I also found myself seeing both Bec and Emily’s paintings really clearly in my head. They were kind of like Mark Ryden’s nightmare paintings but more painterly, like a cross between Ryden and Caravaggio with Emily borrowing her lighting style from Bill Hensen.  I know this sounds a little obsessive of me but the art work became very real in my head while I wrote this book.

Your writing is clearly steeped in the history of classic erotic literature, but I’m wondering who are your favourite contemporary writers or works of erotic fiction?

I love Susan Johnson’s My Hundred Lovers which is a celebration of a woman’s experience of her body in the world and is so sensual and erotic and literary.  I also love James Salter who has just released a novel at 87 years old (All That Is) and it simmers with the sensual and a complete celebration of sex and love and physical joy. I also find Jim Crace’s writing is incredibly sensual.

What’s the next project your working on? Will there be a new novel – erotic or non-erotic – on the way?

I have finished a draft of a new novel, Abstinence, which is based on my interaction with classic erotic fiction and also my temporary obsession with Wilhelm Reich a contemporary of Freud who believed in Orgone Energy, an energy expressed most purely through orgasm that ties everything in the world together. He was instrumental in the sexual revolution and also in my new novel. After that I have a few plans. I am working on a non-erotic novel which is an elaboration on a novella I wrote about Facilitated Communication used by people with severe autism.  I am also researching older women and sexuality for a novel that keeps knocking at the back of my brain.  Several irons in the fire. Including (most excitingly) a non fiction book co-written with Benjamin Law that would be such a fun project and I hope it eventuates. That book with Ben will feel like a holiday for me I think. We have so much fun when we hang out together and I can see that book just being a joy from beginning to end.

– You can read my review of Steeplechase for The Australian here. 

Krissy Kneen’s Steeplechase is available now through Text Publishing. RRP 29.99

I’ve visited Charleston, South Carolina, a few times. It’s a beautiful city: old, by US standards, retaining some of the aesthetic quirks of British and French colonialism. There’s narrow cobblestone streets, Art Deco buildings and elaborate white mansions. Strangers on the street ask about your day. And there’s the location: the lower half of the country, on the Atlantic, meaning that if ever there is cause to be despondent, it’s got nothing to do with the weather.

It’s no surprise this idyllic little spot never turns up in a Ron Rash story. This collection, like several of Rash’s earlier collections and novels, is set exclusively in the Carolinas, from North to South, from the Appalachian Mountains to the coast. Never do we get a charming view of the place. These fourteen stories give us theft, betrayal, vengeance, idiocy, ageing, and abuse and show us people for whom all hope has been vanquished. But your personal proximity to the Carolinas, as a reader, is inconsequential. Why this book deserves a wider audience is because it’s tied not to geography but politics. Rash is a master of the American short story — less meat than Alice Munro, less absurdity than George Saunders, but never the poorer for it. In this collection he introduces his America. It makes for thrilling, sometimes terrifying, reading. Thrilling because his stories are like a galloping horse you’ve been yanked up onto; they are sharp, sometimes coldly humorous, and they never give too much away. Terrifying in the sense that, if his depiction is at all accurate, the world’s dominant economy has a lot to worry about.

Rash’s America is a mean place. The mills are closing, the Mom n’ Pop stores are closing. What does 21st^st Century America make and sell? Meth, mainly. It sends young people to foreign wars and then has TV pundits call them vulgar for fighting. What value there is left is wrung from harsh, hand-to-mouth work (building a road on a chain gang, cleaning blood from the carpet of a doctor’s surgery) for which there is little return. These towns, these counties, this country, used to be a worker’s paradise, where people invented things, discovered things, produced things. That’s all over now. Wherever the future is, it certainly isn’t here.

In the midst of all this desolation, a reader cries out for a bit of hope. Rash knows this. What he does with that information, though, is evidence of his higher skill. There is hope in the goodness of people, Rash tells us. In ‘Twenty-Six Days’, a small-town janitor and his wife work day and night to quell the anxiety that comes from having a child overseas on the front line. For this couple, hope is a given. When you’re mopping up vomit for a living, what else is there? In other stories, characters are slowly brought out of their vulgarity, like a lens being gently pulled into focus. We start to feel for them, root for them, cherish them. And suddenly we can’t believe we ever doubted the goodness in human beings.

But what hope Rash gives us he just as quickly takes away. Many of the stories centre on a mission. Keep going, you can hear Rash telling his characters, keep pushing, just a little farther. You just have to reach the end of the railway tracks, you just have to steal that old man’s gold teeth and sell them, you just have to hear your daughter’s voice over Skype one more time. By about the third or fourth story of this collection, a cruelty sets in. You start to think: this isn’t going to end well. In ‘Cherokee’, a couple drive a beat-up truck they can’t afford to a casino on a Native American reservation. They win big on a slot machine and spend the night in a fancy hotel room. When they wake up, though, the spectre of their normal lives — laying cement, working a supermarket check-out — returns. Hope’s lost. Nothing gold can stay.

It takes a seasoned writer to make a reader turn 180 degrees like this, and do it with so few pages and such black and white prose. Two decades since his first collection, Rash is that writer. He is well-practiced and precise; few stories are over 20 pages and they don’t need to be. His spare writing reveals a great empathy for his characters, and for his country, as both slowly lose the ability to control their own destiny. In a perfect world — an idyllic place, like Charleston, where sunshine and Southern hospitality are a constant — they’d give this writer the marketing heft of Munro or Saunders. And then they’d give him a literary prize, and they’d point to Nothing Gold Can Stay for the proof.

– Paul Donoughue is a musician (Big Strong Brute) and writer. A former News Limited reporter, he now lives in Berlin. 

Ron Rash’s Nothing Gold Can Stay is available now through Text Publishing. RRP 29.99

“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, issues of consent), relationships, friendship, and has probably led to a downturn in q-tip sales for the foreseeable future, it is Dunham’s depiction of her female protagonist as writer that has continued to fascinate me.

At the end of the first season I examined the way Girls had routinely – and I think unfairly – been compared to Sex and the City due to their numerous superficial similarities. The most glaring, though less examined, parallel was the creative occupation of their two central characters. As I wrote last year, “It seems to me that what makes Girls interesting, and more real than anything Carrie did in her six seasons and two films, is Hannah’s wish to live a life worthy of being written about.”

The problem for Hannah was that not much had happened to her yet in her small privileged life that would be of interest in a memoir or series of personal essays. She knew she had to “live them first” before she could write her stories and become, in that oft-quoted line, “the voice of my generation, or at least…a voice, of a generation,” but this season we see Hannah going some way to living a life worth writing (an ebook) about.

In what is one of the funniest moments of the season, Hannah is shown a sign by the editor of online magazine Jazzhate:

“You get it, right?” She asks.

“So like, the magic happens outside your comfort zone.”

Though the editor is presented as vacuous and mildly creepy, Girls S02 is largely concerned with Hannah’s attempts to get to the place where the magic happens, and her misguided and often scarring experiences there.

Working always on the subject of her portrait of the artist as a young woman, Hannah does coke, as she explains to her friends, “to snort for work because I am planning on writing an article that exposes all of my vulnerabilities to the entire internet.” She continues to sleep with unsuitable men, not Adam this time, but a Republican who doesn’t ‘get’ her essays; and Laird, the junky living downstairs, who asks if it’s ok to kiss her back “Yeah but just for tonight though. For work.”

Hannah falters when, in an episode so unusual and self-contained it could almost be a dream sequence, she spends two days with a separated 42 year old in his beautiful, expensive Brooklyn home – all designer chairs and beige palettes. After a day full of sex and naked table tennis, and sometimes a combination of the two, she sits in a plush robe and cries to a man she barely knows:

“I read this article about Fiona Apple in New York magazine where she said ‘Oh everybody acts like I’m nuts, I’m not nuts I just want to feel it all’ and it’s like, that’s what I’m like. I just want to feel it all.”

As in much of the season, it’s a moment that both makes you cringe and feel terribly sad for Hannah. It might not be rendered in picture frames on a wall, but Hannah’s guiding principle is no different from the editor of Jazzhate’s or the tired writerly cliche of suffering for your art.

But “feel it all” she does, to the point of self harm. The last few episodes show Hannah’s disintegration into incapacitating OCD, culminating in the notorious q-tip scene.

In a parody of the starving author in the garret, Hannah locks herself away in her apartment to meet the month-long deadline for her ebook. Crippled with writer’s block, she has nothing to occupy her mind but her own thoughts and insecurities, Googling increasingly outlandish ailments in a spiral of fear and self-loathing.

Unable, or perhaps too arrogant to ask for help, she reassures Jessa that  “I have a lot of great ideas that are forming in my brain.” Perhaps she does, and it’s difficult not to view the q-tip scene as Hannah’s attempt to dig inside her very brain to get those ideas out.

Indeed, re-watching the series it’s remarkable how often Hannah refers to or touches her ear when anyone critiques her writing. It’s there in the second episode when Sandy tells her honestly what he thought of her essay and she replies “I have something in my ear.” If the muse won’t come to her, perhaps it can be accessed with force.

For a series in which the main character is a writer, we are rarely given the opportunity to read Hannah’s prose. Just twice this season do we see her work – a first chapter entitled “Room for Cream?” that begins: “Her name was Murjashihaway.” And the sweeping line in the final episode: “A friendship between college girls is grander and more dramatic than any romance…”

These shots are marked more by the whiteness of the page below than anything written above, shown to underscore the failure of her writing – the oddly un-Hannah tone, and a writer’s block that appears crippling.

Yet this season has rarely been about friendships between (recently graduated) college girls. Hannah has had little in the way of friendship – Marnie moved out, she evicts the deceptive Elijah, Shoshanna is in a relationship-bubble with Ray, and by the end of the season Jessa has disappeared too.

Perhaps Hannah’s Austenesque opening about college girls is true, but Hannah doesn’t write the grand or dramatic – she writes small, personal moments of peculiarity and failure.

As the ebook deadline – and a potential law suit – looms, Hannah murmurs to herself, “I’m going to write a whole book in a day. I’m going to write a full book in one day.” But the only thing she manages to do is binge on Cool Whip and give herself a bad haircut.

A friendship between college girls may indeed be grand and dramatic, but it’s the moments of failure – writer’s block, junk food binges, destructive anxiety and procrastination – that make Hannah’s depiction of life as a writer so un-grand, so un-dramatic and so much more truthful.

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 Australia’s most prestigious literary prize described variously as a “sausage fest” and “cock-forest,” the list is dominated by females, with just two male authors represented: Brian Castro and Tom Keneally.

(Though I can’t actually print the female equivalent of cock-forest, Twitter has helpfully provided me with some potential new terms. Enjoy.)

In what is perhaps a dig at the newly founded Stella Prize, the press release from the Trust Company today emphasises the female-dominated longlist, announcing that while half the original list of 73 submissions were written by women, this year’s longlist “sees the largest number of female authors selected since the longlist was first introduced in 2005.”

There is some overlap between the Stella and Miles Franklin lists, with two of the Stella shortlisted titles on the Miles Franklin longlist: Questions of Travel and Mateship with Birds.

It’s a list that supports first time novelists, with almost half the longlist made up of debut novels by Romy Ash, Annah Faulkner, M.L. Stedman and Jacqueline Wright. The list also includes one former (double) Miles Franklin winner – Thomas Keneally, who won in 1967 for Bring Larks and Heroes and in 1968 for Three Cheers for the Paraclete.

The ten longlisted titles are:

• Romy Ash – Floundering
 (Text)
• Lily Brett – Lola Bensky 
(Hamish Hamilton)
• Brian Castro – Street to Street
 (Giramondo)
• Michelle de Kretser – Questions of Travel 
(A&U)
• Annah Faulkner – The Beloved 
(Picador)
• Tom Keneally – The Daughters of Mars 
(Vintage)
• Drusilla Modjeska – The Mountain 
(Vintage)
• M.L.Stedman – The Light Between Oceans
 (Vintage)
• Carrie Tiffany – Mateship with Birds 
(Picador)
• Jacqueline Wright – Red Dirt Talking (Fremantle Press)

Last year, the prize was won by Anna Funder for All That I Am.

The shortlist will be announced on April 30 2013 and the winner of the $60,000 prize (increased this year from the previous $50,000) to be revealed on June 19th 2013.

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 stories (Like A House On Fire) and a verse novel (The Sunlit Zone) as well as speculative and historical fiction.

Chair of judges Kerryn Goldsworthy told Liticism “of the original almost-200 entries for the prize, the fiction entries outnumbered the nonfiction entries by almost 4 to 1.”

Half the books on the list are published by Allen & Unwin – the large publishing house continuing to be a fixture on major awards lists. However, the shortlist continues to represent small and independent presses, with titles by 5 Islands Press and Scribe.

The six shortlisted titles are:

• The Burial by Courtney Collins (Allen & Unwin)
• Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin)
• The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson (5 Islands Press)
• Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy (Scribe Publications)
• Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin)
• Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany (Pan Macmillan/Picador)

The overall winner of the $50,000 prize will be announced April 16th.

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 supporting the Prize since its inception for over seventeen years, parted company with the Prize in May last year, reportedly in order to focus their arts sponsorship efforts on film.

The 2013 Prize will be known this year simply as the Women’s Prize for Fiction and will be funded privately while the board concludes negotiations with a new long-term sponsor. The new sponsorship partner will be announced prior to the awards ceremony later in the year.

Of the twenty titles on the longlist, two Australian authors appear: Carrie Tiffany for her novel Mateship with Birds and ML Stedman for The Light Between Oceans. You can read my analysis of Tiffany’s novel here, which I criticised when it was released. Will be interesting to see whether Mateship makes the shortlist.

Hilary Mantel has been a fixture on the awards circuit lately, taking out the 2012 Man Booker and Costa prizes for Bring Up the Bodies. An interesting omission on this longlist is J.K. Rowling, going unrewarded for her debut onto the not-for-children scene, A Casual Vacancy.

The longlisted titles are:

• Kitty Aldridge A Trick I Learned From Dead Men (Jonathan Cape)
• Kate Atkinson Life After Life (Doubleday)
• Ros Barber The Marlowe Papers (Sceptre)
• Shani Boianjiu The People of Forever are Not Afraid (Random House)
• Gillian Flynn Gone Girl (Hachette UK)
• Sheila Heti How Should A Person Be? (Random House)
• AM Homes May We Be Forgiven (Granta Books)
• Barbara Kingsolver Flight Behaviour (Faber & Faber)
• Deborah Copaken Kogan The Red Book (Hachette UK)
• Hilary Mantel Bring Up the Bodies (HarperCollins UK)
• Bonnie Nadzam Lamb (Random House)
• Emily Perkins The Forrests (Bloomsbury Publishing)
• Michèle Roberts Ignorance (Bloomsbury Publishing)
• Francesca Segal The Innocents (Random House)
• Maria Semple Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Hachette UK)
• Elif Shafak Honour (Penguin UK)
• Zadie Smith NW (Penguin Group US)
• ML Stedman The Light Between Oceans (Random House)
• Carrie Tiffany Mateship with Birds (Pan Macmillan)
• G Willow Wilson Alif the Unseen (Atlantic Books)

Last year, the Prize was won by US author Madeline Miller for her debut novel The Song of Achilles.

The shortlist will be announced on April 16th 2013 and the winner of the £30,000 prize to be revealed on June 5th 2013.

“If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell?”

In her debut novel The Burial, Courtney Collins supposes that the earth would favour the stories of those who are furthest from it, ‘the ones who are suspended in flight’. The dirt must long for these distant stories the way a child yearns for an absent mother. Collins chooses to literalise this longing; her fictional tale about the historical Jessie Hickman, Australia’s last bushranger, is told through the dead eyes of Jessie’s newborn child.

The child’s voice delivers the novel’s moving beginning, breathtaking in its horror:

“In that first light of morning my body contorted and I saw my own fingers reaching up to her, desperate things. She held them and I felt them still and I felt them collapse. And then she said, Shhh, Shhh, my darling. And then she slit my throat.”

The infant narrator follows Jessie’s flight into the Hunter Valley. Jessie has just murdered her husband and buried her child. As we watch her struggle and ebb, she blends with the desolate landscape. She is constantly fleeing to higher and higher ground. There’s a hopelessness about her situation, and we sense that she is an already dead woman running. The Burial is a novel about the bare bones of survival, but with a glimpse of hope that peaks with her final escape.

Jessie’s back-story is trickled down through flashbacks, which are expertly interspersed with the arc of Jessie’s flight. Jessie had an eventful past – loved by her father but despised by her mother, at a very young age she was sold to a circus. When the circus disbands, she turns to cattle rustling, is arrested, and spends two years in gaol before she is sold to the man who will make her his wife.

Collins’ decision to tell Jessie’s story through her dead infant is an ambitious move, but not without its pitfalls. The first person narration is strong and rhythmic at the beginning, repeating the words ‘morning of my birth’ like a mantra. However, it is difficult for Collins to commit to the infant voice; it tends to drop away halfway through as the novel is given over to a third person style of narration, but resurfaces at certain points and resurges at the end.

Collins seems to spot that the infant narrator is problematic, and gives the newborn an underground adventure independent of Jessie’s own trials in the harsh scrub above. The infant converses with the forty-year-old corpse of a man buried just a foot below. The encounter reads as an attempt to legitimise the infant voice, but it ultimately does not add to the narrative power of the story. Although this meeting is grotesque and the corpse’s story adds to the gothic element of the novel, it would have been more worthwhile to develop the characters already part of the story.

The lack of depth is perhaps the major failing of the book. The Australian’s Tom Gilling made the apt observation that Collins’ characters “never quite come alive.” For example, Jessie is forced to marry the repulsive Fitz, but Fitz is a monster without motivation. He is a violent drunkard who is more cardboard than human. The reader cannot relate to him on any meaningful level, and this, in turn, colours the way we view Jessie in her dealings with him. Although the circumstances between them are terrifying, we feel somewhat removed.

The book itself is beautiful, and the short segments (never extending beyond a few pages) make The Burial a quick and engrossing read. But because each segment is so short, too many moments in the novel are made epic.

The Burial continually shifts focus; one moment, it is digging and stirring in the earth; another, it is gazing in wonder at the stars. The interplay between stargazing and earth dwelling shapes Jessie’s story, which takes place in the space between. She is elevated and legendary, earning a place amongst the stars of Australia’s gritty history. At the same time, she has an affinity with the land, and death relentlessly pursues her, pushing her ever closer to a burial of her own.

Yet, the space between earth and sky is disappointingly out of focus. While Collins gives us many snapshots of Jessie, we never have a clear picture. Jessie’s story leaves an imprint – the novel lingers for months after reading. Yet, (save for the opening scene) the novel lacks a sharp, visceral portrayal of Jessie’s anguish or love, the qualities that would make her human.

Jessie’s psyche remains a mystery. We are never truly admitted into Jessie’s thoughts, and although this is disheartening, perhaps it is ultimately the point. Jack Brown, Jessie’s Aboriginal lover, considers Jessie as “a shifting thing on the landscape.” Jessie is uncontainable, like trying to hold water in cupped hands.

Jessie resists death, capture, and even Jack Brown’s love. Her enigmatic nature makes her a blank canvas on which Collins can paint her own impressions. Unfortunately, such an illusory figure ultimately defies Collins’ own attempts to contain her through prose.

Courtney Collins’ The Burial is out now through Allen & Unwin. RRP $27.99

– Erin Handley is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Farrago, Right Now, in Brief and Mary Journal. You can follow her on Twitter @erinahandley.