Category: Behind the book

If you’re like me when you enjoy a thing, you want others to share that joy. The drunk bellowing over your shoulder at the football game might be irksome, but doesn’t it beat being an audience of one? This is particularly so if you’re a writer. Sure, we should write for ourselves (goes the advice), […]

At the 2022 Great Big Book Club held at Success Library with Fremantle Press, historical fiction authors David Whish-Wilson, Sharron Booth and Portland Jones made the writing process sound equal parts challenging and rewarding. Moderator and author Brooke Dunnell kicked off the discussion by having each author introduce their book. Despite their vastly different plots […]

People ask me: Where do your ideas come from?  Each of my books has a different genesis, but often the starting point is me saying,`I want to write a story that does X’.  Sometimes the inspiration is no more than an image or scene that sparks in my brain. Or it might be a big […]

Nadia Rhook is a historian and poet, born in Naarm / Melbourne and currently living in Boorloo / Perth. Her new poetry collection examines birth and parenthood with a consciousness that spans centuries. Second Fleet Baby draws on the energies of 18th century English convict women, including her own ancestors, to open raw questions of […]

Andrew Sutherland’s brilliant debut book examines Queer and HIV-positive identity from the point of diagnosis to the point of openness, resilience and transformation. In this piece Andrew reflects on writing the collection. The Events Here is a poem, failed or unfinished: I was in the waiting room of a clinic in Boat Quay, Singapore. It […]

Bron Bateman’s latest collection of poems, Blue Wren, is structured around a suite of Frida Kahlo paintings that provide a powerful way of healing, of reclaiming the past and of embracing the beauty of now. But in this article, Bron shares how the collection might never have been without some key advice from a friend. […]

It’s 17 years since Dianne Wolfer and Brian Harrison-Lever’s award-winning and acclaimed picture book for older readers was released. And it’s 80 years since the Kokoda Track battles it depicts took place. Published on 30 July 2005 and set in 1942, Photographs in the Mud is told from the point of view of two soldiers, […]

My omnibus (best word ever), The Vexatious Haunting of Lily Griffin grew out of my first middle reader novel Lily in the Mirror (CBCA Notable 2017 – just saying). Lily is a character that appeared one day and spoke to me, I felt like she was whispering in my ear. Don’t judge. Then she wrapped […]

Patsy Millett, the author of Inseparable Elements: Dame Mary Durack was the guest speaker at the Perth/Crawley Rotary Club on the occasion of World Polio Day 2022. Her sister, Robin Miller, is celebrated as a pioneer of delivering Polio vaccine to remote communities, saving countless lives. This is Patsy’s speech:

Synchronicity – it’s a ‘thing’ for many authors. During the research and writing of each story in my historical ‘Light’ series I’ve experienced delightfully unnerving coincidences, making me wonder how books come about. Do I choose the story or does the story choose me? In the case of The Last Light Horse, perhaps it’s the […]

This book didn’t start life as a book. It began as therapeutic journaling to deal with the trauma that re-emerged when the man who violently attacked me in my workplace was, some twenty-five years later, arrested and charged with brutal rape and murder. When Bradley Robert Edwards was arrested in 2016 for a series of […]

nlimited Futures: Visionary, Speculative Blak and Black Fiction is now available and we’re over the moon for all the contributors, editors, designers and publishers involved. A week past the release, we asked editors Rafeif Ismail and Ellen van Neerven to reflect on the journey thus far.

Sharron Booth had been working on her novel The Silence of Water years before it was shortlisted for the City of Fremantle Hungerford Award in 2020. In this post she shares a deep dive into the research techniques she learned along the way.

Katie Stewart, author of three books for younger readers, knows that goal-setting isn’t an innate ability, but a skill to be learned. In this blog post, she shares how and why teaching kids to set goals at a young age is an important step towards building confidence and resilience.   

Kyle Hughes-Odgers is the creator of a new board book Everything You Want to See. The artist and father takes us through how he gets his ideas and the collaborative process of translating them onto the page. Everything You Want to See started as an idea in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic. […]

The Sawdust House is my third historical novel, following on from The Coves in 2018. I’m normally a crime fiction novelist, but my crime novels have an historical element too, with most of them set in 1970s and 1980s Perth and Fremantle. All of the novels require a fair bit of research, but it’s research […]

Fans of art heists, fakes and the hunt for long-lost art treasures are going to love The Gallerist, a new mystery story by Michael Levitt. In it, Mark Lewis is running a small art gallery when a local woman brings him a painting for valuing that looks uncannily like the work of the renowned but […]

Lion, is that you? by Moira Court is a gorgeous multi-layered new picture book that plays on myths about big cats stalking through the Australian bush. We asked Moira to share with us five books featuring big cats that she loved reading to her daughter. We think you’ll agree her choices, would make wonderful, purring […]

In Only Birds Above Arthur Watkins, is a blacksmith serving with the 10th Light Horse Regiment in the Middle East during World War I.  When he returns home without his horse – the companion he’s worked alongside for four years – he is a man forever changed by what he has seen and suffered. In […]

Mental health language matters and we all have to do better. There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the way we use language. How it can cause prejudice. But what about the way we use language surrounding mental health? More often than not it’s derogatory. Social change is the constant, […]

A Shot in the Dark came to a thrilling end on Wednesday 17 November as Alan Carter said goodbye to Cato Kwong and discussed the latest book in the series, Crocodile Tears, with Craig Kirchner from Abbey’s Bookstore in Sydney.

Described as ‘breathtaking’, ‘wise’ and ‘poetic’, Maria Papas’s City of Fremantle Hungerford Award winning novel Skimming Stones explores the impact of childhood illness and trauma on families. Set in a paediatric oncology ward and at Lake Clifton in Australia’s South West, Skimming Stones is about a nurse named Grace, who cares for and guides her […]

This Remembrance Day, I thought I’d share a few of the things I discovered while researching my novel Where the Line Breaks that I think deserve to be a little better remembered. My initial idea was to write about a real life Australian war poet, romanticising and fictionalising his or her life in a straightforward […]

Best known for her history of the Durack family, Kings in Grass Castles, Dame Mary Durack Miller was a friend and confidante to many celebrated writers, actors and artists, and an active and much leaned-upon president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Drawing on a great accumulation of firsthand sources, principally her mother’s diaries and […]