Category: Behind the book

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 […]

Karen Herbert took to the stand on Wednesday 6 October to discuss her debut crime novel, The River Mouth, a small-town noir where long-kept secrets are bubbling up to the surface as part of this year’s A Shot in the Dark series. Karen was quizzed by Jane Seaton of Beaufort Street Books in Perth, with […]

In which, via a series of plot twists and non sequiturs, a prose editor gets around to asking a poetry editor about how and why she does what she does. Metaphors abound.

It’s been ten years since Detective Philip ‘Cato’ Kwong was introduced to the world. He was in his thirties then; the classical piano playing, cryptic crossword solving, stubborn obsessive was badly in need of redemption in both his career and his marriage. We first met him in Prime Cut, persona non grata, exiled to Stock […]

Fans of camembert and crime were treated to a criminally good talk when Sally Scott shared her cheese recommendations and talked about her debut cosy crime novel, Fromage, with Fiona Hardy from Readings Books in Melbourne on Wednesday 8 September.

Lawyer and debut author, Lisa Ellery, was taken to the witness stand on Wednesday 18 August to be questioned about her crime novel, Private Prosecution, by Fiona Stager from Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane in the second A Shot in the Dark event of the year.

In his new memoir Second Innings: On Men, Mental Health and Cricket Barry Nicholls says, ‘Life is like facing an opening bowler: the pitch is unknown, the ball is new and you don’t know what will be delivered.’ He describes the book as a story about his passion for cricket and how the friendships formed […]

In early 2018, I decided to shake up my travel writing career by setting out on a huge journey by rail around Australia, from Far North Queensland to south-west Western Australia. It was a vast undertaking, involving seven long-distance trains (with an eighth as an epilogue), at various levels of comfort, along with side-trips in […]

My novel, The Night Village, begins with my shell-shocked main character, Simone, sitting in a London maternity ward holding a newborn baby and wondering exactly how she’s landed there. The next day she returns to her boyfriend Paul’s apartment and is plunged into her new life as a mother. A few weeks later, Paul’s cousin […]

Alex Forrest’s Idle Torque: stories for classic car enthusiasts is for anyone who likes their yarns to smell like hot engine oil and roll like greased lightning. We chatted to Alex about the best bits.

Debut author, Zoe Deleuil, had hearts racing as she talked about her novel, The Night Village, with Dani Vee from Words and Nerds podcast in the first A Shot in The Dark event of the year on Wednesday 28 July.

Written while travelling the globe over five years, Locust Summer was shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award (2017) and was developed through a fellowship at Varuna, the National Writers’ House. In this blog post, David Allan-Petale invites you along for the journey.

Hassan Al Nawwab was born in Iraq in 1960 and came to Australia in 2003 with his wife and children. He is a poet and journalist who has published three volumes of poetry and two plays in Arabic, and has received numerous awards for his poems.

Vociferate | 詠 is Western Australian writer Emily Sun’s debut poetry collection. Alice Pung has described the book as ‘polemical, personal and political’ – in it, Emily meditates upon a range of issues that have shaped her world. Emily was born in British colonial Hong Kong to stateless diasporic-Chinese parents, who are descendants of Chinese […]

David Price says when we hold strong views about a subject, we often do not like to listen to contrary ones. He says, ‘In fact, we live in a time when we are able to exclusively access – mainly online – only the information and opinions that suit our own view of the world. In […]

Described as ‘thoughtful’, ‘delightfully subversive’ and ‘tenderly insightful’, The Little Boat on Trusting Lane by Mel Hall is a novel about how human connection, community and friendship have the potential to heal. In this piece, she describes how the Perth writing community helped her bring her debut novel into being.

One of the questions I get asked about my picture books is ‘Why are they about animals?’ The automatic response for me would be ‘Because I love animals’, but the truth is a little more complex.

Michael Burrows, author of Where the Line Breaks, sends a letter home from the muddy trenches of writing and editing a debut novel, in the style of the extraordinary letters sent home by the first Anzacs.