It was such an honour to be nominated for City of Parramatta's Citizen of the Year AND Parramatta's Lit! Festival was nominated for Community Group/Project of the Year! Such a delight to serve the writers, readers, publishers & storytellers of Parramatta. Thank you to my nominators for your support!

Marque will be open for business on 26 January. We do not think it’s a good date for our national day because what it marks is the beginning of the destruction of an entire population and ancient culture. We would like our country to grow up and choose a kinder day.

“…the sensitivity is so extreme that representatives from Melbourne and Sydney Writers’ Festivals declined to be interviewed for this story”. Certainly going to be a litmus test for Oz culture come May… www.theage.com.au/culture/book...

The way things are going you wouldn’t half mind being beamed up, I reckon! Delighted to receive agent copies today of Brendan Colley’s divine second novel, out in April from @transitlounge.bsky.social

Wonder how this one will get on with OZ's new hate speech laws?😂 (from Ultimo in May...)

From @genesegrill.bsky.social: "It is astonishing to experience Musil experiencing and trying to describe the new phenomena of Robert Walser and Franz Kafka here, fresh, unprepared, astonished." genesegrill.substack.com/p/musils-191...

Couldn't agree more. Linda Atkins is the one to watch - heart the size of Western Sydney, and her writing like a pearl formed from years of grit and hard work. I adore her writing.

Also spotted: first mention of Wayne Marshall’s glorious Henry Goes Bush, in May from Picador! www.theaustralian.com.au/culture/from...

Excited to see the first mention of Linda’s debut in the OZ’s 2026 wrap! Official announcement still to come, but one of the biggest discoveries of my agenting career I reckon - Linda is the real deal! www.theaustralian.com.au/culture/from...

Another Kafka unit taught by Max Sebald. “Please note also that work presented in seriously flawed English will be marked down”

WE WANT YOUR PROSE—submit now to read at our Feb 21 Lettrétage event about Christa Wolf (and her post-Wall writing e.g. One Day A Year). Send us some short prose in any language about the day, the daily, the recurring date, everyday politics. We will print a zine! sites.google.com/view/mayroec...

Some sad news

"Peter Malinauskas now holds the dubious position in Australian history as the man who attempted to uphold social cohesion and his own moral reputation while simultaneously destroying both" @ronnisalt.bsky.social theshot.net.au/uncategorize...

Congrats to amongst others @jeffsparrow1.bsky.social, nominated for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship for his biography of Lesbia Harford! (Also, @lancerichardson.bsky.social in Melbourne town in March!) hazelrowley.com/news/

I’m in a fringe show. Will be what it says on the box

“It’s not everyone you’re not lonely with”. Magic little para in Eimear McBride’s Lesser Bohemians…

That's cute: there's a book of letters to the editor by, and about, Thomas Bernhard

Vale Marie Bashir, who once gave me love life advice at the Sydney Opera House at the interval of Eugene Onegin. We were eating finger sandwiches. It had a profound effect on me.

creativecritical.net is open for submissions! Please send your > essays, poems, stories, translations > reflections on the relationship between creative and critical practice > course materials or syllabi that incorporate creative work into critical teaching to [email protected]

Italian voice actor Carlo Bononi was the voice of all of the characters on Pingu. A trained clown by trade, he used a theater technique called grammelot, which consists of "speaking" in a mix of babbled gibberish noises. He improvised all the voices live and unscripted.

Whether it's illegal to say it or not (?), Israel is quite clearly committing genocide in Palestine. The Australian government (but not the Australian people) is quite clearly supporting it. And our farce of a democracy is being further eroded so people don't speak this truth.

Have been finding this book a fascinating read (eyewitness accounts, edited by Tim Flannery), particularly in terms of early British interactions with the local indigenous tribes. This sort of thing too:

"I do love the way you talk about your books. Your pitch for this one is characteristically excellent" Not often you get a "good job" in agenting, outside of the simple selling aspect. And I do try hard to write a good letter! So this in reply to a submission today - I really appreciate! #agentlife

Terrible restaurant could close unless people enthusiastically embrace bad food, complains chef.

I regret to tell you we have now arrived at the point where we are forced to agree with Michael O'Leary. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The longlist has been selected! Congratulations to all of the authors, publishers, and translators of these marvelous books.

When Dorothy Parker was a critic for Vanity Fair, she kept taped to the wall of her office a full-color step-by-step guide on how to embalm someone.

one of them must be lying

We are shattered and grieving the loss of our brother Rob. For now there are no words but there will always be songs. Love Always from Jim, Martin & Pete.

I like that the same day a guy was like “this place will never be Twitter” this thread gave us the most 2015 Twitter experience (complimentary) imaginable.

"As we have seen, defending the right of people to speak, even when we deeply disagree with them, is very, very difficult. Nor is it sensible to expect it of everyone. But we must demand it of the custodians of our culture. This is the way forward". V good this... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

und wir gehen unter.

“Devastated literary figures have been working hard behind the scenes” This community 📚❤️✊🏼 www.indailysa.com.au/news/just-in...

Blue Monday's title was taken from an illustration by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions #BlueMonday (THREAD 3 of 10)

“There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago”. The President of the United States challenges the legitimacy of the European colonial project since Columbus

“I do not know how to rid the world of evil, or whether one is simply supposed to endure it. But you are there and are having an effect, and the poems have an effect of their own and help to protect you—that is the answer and a counterbalance in this world.” — Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, 1958

Submitter who links to their on-average 2-star Goodreads reviews is quite the flex!

Oh no, the Americans are going to wake up.

Most of these think pieces about Adelaide completely miss the point. There is a genocide in progress. If you’re curating a festival of ideas, do you want people who talk about supporting the genocide or speakers who talk about opposing it? Everything else is secondary.

The Australia & New Zealand Film Festival on in London at the end of the month (tempting!) www.fanza.org/events/austr...

This sounds very unfun!

people on the internet will say they DNFed a book (pron: dee en eff) rather than say they didn't finish a book, thus saving themselves between 0 and -1 syllables

"Wenn man die Lage Polens auf dem Globus anschaut, sind die vom Deutschen Reich gestellten Fragen übrigens nachvollziehbar." Was für ein wahnsinnig gefährlicher Trottel!

Honoured to be nominated for City of Parramatta's Citizen of the Year, 2026 for my volunteer work across arts and culture in the city. Thank you to my nominator, and all the artists and organisations I've worked with or for in the City - it's been my pleasure!

Raymond Carver came to Sydney in ‘85? I don’t think I knew this. From Helen Garner’s diaries.

Lovely to see @magistrabeck.bsky.social now here!

Fam, I may have just achieved my final form. I just handsold Close Reading in the 21st Century to... ... ... JAMES FUCKING WOOD!!!!

Very excited to announce our Fall 2026 books via our newsletter today. And now here! BLUE SUNSET by Denise Rose Hansen and WHAT REMAINS by Brais Lamela (trans by Jacob Rogers) will be out Oct 6, 2026! Read more about these two wonderful new novels at our website: dorothyproject.com/books-gallery/

How to improve publishing: Publish fancy hardbacks and affordable paperbacks on the same day (instead of a year apart). Don't sign authors for what they represent, but what they write. Sign 20 debuts for £10k each instead of one for £200,000. Ban celebs from kid's lit. De-emphasise the Booker.