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 change in literary awards since the controversy over the 2011 all-male Miles Franklin shortlist.

Named after Stella Maria Miles Franklin, the award aims to “celebrate women’s contributions to Australian literature”. The prize, worth $50,000, is awarded for the best work by an Australian female author published in the previous calendar year.

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, and I had initially thought it was harmless (though admittedly depressing) clickbait, disappearing as quickly as it had reared its ugly head in the pages of my newspaper. Passages such as this:

Any teacher abrogating their duty of care and who is misguided enough to teach the book will face this question from a student: ‘What is your view on sex with a child?’ If they say it is unacceptable, then a student can surely ask, ‘Why is the book on the course?’ There is no defence.

So ostentatiously absurd that they require little more in the way of rebuttal than to be reproduced with one of many appropriate gifs.

But with the news on Friday that the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority has decided to review its decision to include the novel on the curriculum, the issue becomes more serious, and I find myself wanting to respond.

Guest Post by Rebecca Howden 

From the opening scenes of The Engagement, there’s an atmosphere that drenches the pages with a subtle, simmering sense of dread. Filling her mis-en-scene with gothic tropes that recall the gloomy romance of classics like Rebecca and Jane Eyre, acclaimed Australian writer Chloe Hooper draws us into a tense, brilliantly crafted story that grapples with the tangled threads of power and desire.

– 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, bombings, book burnings and deaths showering from it like the plane that combusts in its opening pages.

One of the great pleasures / responsibilities of being a lit critic is that you are asked to review countless debut novels. When I first began reviewing, I remember this feeling unusual to me – coming as I did from a background in academia, where you generally don’t read anything without an almost infuriating knowledge of every critical perspective, every last theoretical interpretation, every minute biographical detail.

What struck me about latest release debuts is how pure, almost virginal the experience of reading them is. How free I am from anything that might sway me one way or another in my interpretation of the text.

With established authors, however, it appears that any new novel is judged though the prism of their previous works. It’s the Faustian contract writers enter into when they publish their first novel: if granted any level of success, you’ll never be free of your earlier works, and everything you do will be inescapably judged against it.

And so it was with the release of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, consigned in almost every review I read to a comparison with the Harry Potter books – Pagford is said to be populated with Muggles, one of the principal families described as pale imitations of the Dursleys, the book retitled (admittedly rather brilliantly) Mugglemarch. 

If you were on twitter late last night, your feed may have been tantalisingly (and confusingly) peppered with such bon mots as:  ‘She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of custard,’ or ‘His body impinged upon hers, and he was stroking her here… and there… and there and there and there’, or ‘My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic,’ or ‘She had had three boyfriends since university… none had shown any particular interest in her chrysanthemum.’

The shortlist for the Literary Review’s 20th annual Bad Sex Awards were announced last night, and the nominees are:

Lately I’ve been re-watching Girls. It was a series I originally came to – perhaps like everyone else downloading it in Australia – through the furore raging on most of my favourite US sites. The Hairpin, Salon, Grantland, The New Yorker, et al. had run essays on it, and so I was vaguely familiar with the ubiquitous press shot of four white, pretty, New York girls sitting on a park bench. ‘Isn’t it just a twenty-something version of Sex and the City?’ I dismissively said to a friend who was recommending it to me one night. ‘No, they deal with that in the first episode’ she told me.

And so, one evening earlier this year, I lay back to that ever-promising sound, the static-y click of the HBO title intro, and let myself be drawn into Lena Dunham’s version of New York.

Sometimes when I’m looking for a bar or a gallery or some other place in one of Melbourne’s impossible back alleyways, I open up google maps, and once it’s puzzled through the coordinates and found the location I’ll zoom and zoom in upon that orange mark. At some point in its descent, the map becomes, seemingly of its own accord, real life images of the street. Closer and closer I scroll, finding sometimes that it has captured the blurred faces of people hurriedly walking, and I wonder what they must think of being caught there, like the twenty-first century version of a bug in amber.

In her new novel NW, Zadie Smith has similarly zoomed in upon the streets of a city. The title itself is a coordinate, orienting you in this frenetic, multienthic part of London, the North-West areas of the capital. Smith has plunged down through the map further, beyond blurry pixilated faces, into their lives, into their languages. Moving down into the fray, she alights upon four characters: Leah, Felix, Natalie and Nathan.

By now you’ve no doubt heard that the parent companies of trade publishing houses Penguin Books and Random House – Pearson and Bertelsmann respectively – have combined to form the world’s largest book publisher, which will now be known as Penguin Random House.

The official announcement came on Monday, following days of speculation after Peterson confirmed that the two companies had been in talks. The rumours sparked much hilarity on Twitter, with speculation as to what the new name might be – the particularly amusing Random Penguins (and the associated meme) being the favoured title, as well as Penguin House or even, wittily, PenguinHaus.

It’s almost the end of the literary awards season, and the last few weeks have been eventful times for literary prizes.

I attended the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Melbourne lit scene in suits and cocktail dresses casting off its ‘bathrobe era’ attire (and found just how addicted we all are to our phones when I was told nervously by several writers that there is no internet in the Plaza Ballroom). The next morning I awoke to learn that Hilary Mantel had won the Man Booker for the second time, making history as the first British and first female author to do so. There was the Nobel Prize for literature; the press release came through that the inaugural Stella Prize is set for April next year, an exciting new fixture on the awards calendar; and then the shortlist for SPUNC’s Most Underrated Book of the Year award – of which I am a judge – was released, and I have spent the last few days in deliberations over the winner.

Last night Mo Yan – the author of Red Sorghum, Big Breasts & Wide Hips, and Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out – became the first Chinese national author to win the Nobel Prize for literature in its 111 year history. The Swedish Academy awarded Yan the world’s most prestigious literary honour for his merging of ‘folk tales, history and the contemporary’ with ‘hallucinatory realism.’

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year.

When I walk into the launch of the Younger Young Writers’ Journal on the final night of NYWF, the young writers are covered in blue paint, faint blue marks smudged on their cheeks from journals recently printed, the ink not yet dry. It has the unintentional effect of looking like an initiation ritual, a physical sign of their admission into the world of writing and publishing.

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year.

It’s easy to doubt yourself when writing to Christian Lander. But it’s only after I send him my interview questions that I realise they’re written in Helvetica and that I’ve just potentially marked myself as hopelessly ‘white person’ too.

Lander has turned this sort of self-conscious lampooning into an art form – when he began his blog Stuff White People Like in 2008, he tapped into a cultural phenomenon of ‘left-leaning, city-dwelling, white folk.’ His ‘White Person’ was essentially a hipster, yet with less of the sneering negativity that word has come to connote.

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year.

There’s a small link at the top of Bkclb’s Infinite Book project which directs to the Wikipedia entry on Borges’ The Book of Sand – a typically curious Borges tale about a book of all books that is ‘exactly infinite’: possessing neither a beginning or an end. The text becomes a monstrous, tormenting object to its owner in the Borges tale, but it’s a far less troubling idea in the age of the internet, and Bkclb have turned the concept into an interesting way to discover ebook titles we may not have sought out otherwise.

The beats. The lost generation. The romantics. The modernists. The dirty realists. Before I’d read any of the works that fell within them, I knew of these names. They conjure a time, and often a city, they characterise a period. It made the ‘lesser’ writers within these groups bigger, and gave a higher purpose to the writing than the sum of its parts. Though, admittedly, the names of many literary movements have been bestowed years afterwards by academics searching for a thesis topic, whether self-identified or not they described writers with a unified aesthetic who worked together or were at least part of the same ‘scene’. And yet, I cannot think of a single literary movement in the current era. What’s happened to literary schools?

In recent years, generational packaging is the way authors are grouped, with The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 being the most prominent example. Editor David Remnick explicitly noted that the last list of talented under-40s have nothing in common beyond their age: ‘This is not an aesthetic grouping’ he said of the most recent list in 2010.