My god, why are we doing this again?? I know these packages are supposed to be conversation-starters, aka engagement bait, but these are honestly and truly not either useful or urgent conversations to be having right now about books, publishing, the novel www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Yep, I grew up in Farrer too and I’m gutted by the result, but not really surprised. What with the LNP knifing a very popular local member, the ALP not even bothering to field a candidate, and blizzards of bullshit FIFO commentary about rural Oz, the space was left wide open for ON.

Giving this another plug because it seems to be outside the paywall for the moment.

Bluesky gets sketchy, I go offline, come back and there’s a Massive Attack x Tom Waits collab doing the rounds. Actual omg

‘We support entrepreneurial scholars and practitioners’ - what a ride (and how tf to read this parable of contemporary literature?)

New from me on Guardian Australia: a review of Kathryn Heyman’s Circle of Wonders, a novel notable for its sharp attention to the humanity of its vulnerable central characters www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

I wrote for ABR about, The Ruin of Magic, a new essay collection by Kate Holden. I’ve long admired Holden’s work but this collection, which deals with pressing questions of home, belonging, migration and exile, struck me as seriously undercooked. www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/c...

This is a fine @catrionamp.bsky.social review of @erinvincent.bsky.social 's outstanding book. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I wrote about Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent for GuarDian Australia, a very accomplished, very affecting work. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I'll always remember Kristi Noem for the "Meth. We're on it." campaign.

Catriona Menzies Pike on what the Los Angeles Review of Books mess says about the landscape for literary journals, and the big test ahead for the new Meanjin. On point as always

I’m still writing my newsletter Infra Dig, which covers digital literary culture and related themes. The latest deals mainly with editorial independence - at Meanjin and LARB. infra-dig.ghost.io/returning-ho...

Carney is rightly getting hosed for this softly-softly response - but you know what, I think Albanese, desperate to make it look like Australia’s most important defence partnership hasn’t been sidelined, is going to be much more effusive. (Happy to be wrong!)

If only it were possible to wrest the microphone on Australian republicanism from the easy does it yacht club crowd at the ARM. The ARM promise that nothing would change in an Australian republic is yet another example of small target politics making itself irrelevant.

I’ve been out of action for a few weeks and not able to read much. My main response to the AWW debacle, now that I’m catching up properly, is, is this shit for real? I wrote a newsletter about risk, cancel culture and concussion. infra-dig.ghost.io/hard-surfaces/

Reader, I wept.

Knut Hamsun gave his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels in 1943, if anyone is looking for a precedent. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

This is an excellent question. Not so long ago I would’ve expected Tony Burke - or any arts minister in an Albanese government - to defend vigorously artistic freedom in general and the artistic freedom of minorities in particular. Gutting to have been proved so wrong, so often.

Looks like National Treasure Trent Dalton is still in.

Imagine being a board member of a major arts organisation, one with a long and storied history as the Adelaide Festival does, one that has flourished in spite of a federal funding and policy environment, and being willing to scupper it on such specious, racist grounds.

Statement from @australiainstitute.org.au on Adelaide Festival.

I am stunned and saddened by this announcement. Adelaide Writers Week has been an important platform for Arab and Palestinian voices these past few years. I greatly admire director Louise Adler and her fearless advocacy for freedom of speech. There will be more to come on this story, I’m sure.

An amazing set of essays to close the year, curated by my friends at the Sydney Review of Books: brilliant critics, a roving set of questions. And congratulations to Eda Gunaydin, the new Parramatta Laureate, following in the mighty footsteps of Yumna Kassab. mailchi.mp/sydneyreview...

"Book polls are bunk but this one did make me wonder whether there is any audience left for Australian literature, good, great or middling" @catrionamp.bsky.social infra-dig.ghost.io/books-in-cri...

In my last newsletter of the year, I let off steam about Trent Dalton, The Mushroom Tapes, Australian publishing and the books I hope - likely in vain - will not be commissioned in the aftermath of the Bondi tragedy. infra-dig.ghost.io/books-in-cri...

Hoo boy! ‘Dalton demonstrates over and over again that he is incapable of presenting his declared themes with any nuance or gravitas or pathos, or even credibility.’ Maybe - just maybe - Trent Dalton is not a national treasure?

Who else remembers Pyne’s extemporising on Australian history when he was education minister? Absolute rubbish appointment

Catriona Menzies-Pike on ‘critical provincialism’: ‘I’d advocate for a set of reading practices that stay close to the contours of place and culture, that let themselves be informed by topography and history’. Yes!

I wrote a long piece for the SRB on Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, international literary success, and the heightened tension between universalising and provincial readings when Australian novels go global. sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/the-...

If, when I wrote this piece in 2022, you’d asked me whether Boy Swallows Universe would’ve been judged best book of the century so far in a poll of 288K readers, I think I would’ve said, yeah naaaaah. But here we are.

@secondmentions.bsky.social 'the polarizing spread'

I wrote a long piece for the SRB on Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, international literary success, and the heightened tension between universalising and provincial readings when Australian novels go global. sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/the-...

I signed off on my review of The Mushroom Tapes before the book got the gold plate publicity treatment over the weekend. When I write that it’s hard to differentiate this book from the torrents of chatter about the case, it’s not a positive evaluation. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

I signed off on my review of The Mushroom Tapes before the book got the gold plate publicity treatment over the weekend. When I write that it’s hard to differentiate this book from the torrents of chatter about the case, it’s not a positive evaluation. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

The defenestration of Andrew is a good start. But why stop there? www.newstatesman.com/politics/202...

I suppose not taking a massive step backwards counts as a win. I wrote for Crikey about copyright, AI, Anthropic and the TDM exemption that the Albanese government has finally ruled out.

Some personal news: I’m a baseball fan now. 🤷‍♀️

Canada will remember.

This is why they’re going after the right to culture, per @annakornbluh.bsky.social and @isanchezprado.bsky.social; because they cannot control it, do not understand it, and truly fear it (as well they should). As for desperation and self-degradation, Stephen Miller obviously speaks as an expert.

This is truly bizarre. It’s one thing to apply for funding and complain when you don’t get it - quite another to complain about not getting funding that you didn’t apply for. The details here about contracts with artists are truly eye-popping.

Holy hell, I know I should just ignore the RN Top 100 books list, I know that there’s nothing new to say other than, didn’t the NYT do a slicker version of this last year?, but what an absolute nonsense this list makes of any notion of literary or aesthetic value. www.abc.net.au/listen/radio...

I’m going to re-up my own piece on BSU. Back in 2022 I wrote that Dalton was the novelist-laureate of Scott Morrison’s Australia. Why is it that readers can’t move on from this guy and his retrograde fantasies? sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/crit...

FFS Boy Swallows Universe might be the most popular Australian book of the century but I will go to my grave insisting that it is sloppy, racist conservative drivel, that its breathless hug it out / bootstraps ethos represents the worst of us www.abc.net.au/listen/radio...

What’s this? Yet more research concluding that robust public investment in the arts yields economic benefits? A great outcome for Ireland, and a rebuke to all those tired cliches about freeloading artists sapping the resources of the state. But also, art enriches us all, economic benefits or no.

New: A deep dive with some alarming new revelations on the silencing of one of the few remaining independent progressive voices in Australian media. Who killed Meanjin?

Very easy to do: support.academia.edu/hc/en-us/art...

"It's been put to me that literary magazines are ephemeral, and when established ones close, their absence creates a space for new magazines to thrive... And yet in Australia in 2025, the space left when a cultural organisation closes is hardly fertile terrain. It's more like a vacuum"

New newsletter out in the world: just one more thing about the Meanjin debacle; a 1963 open letter on funding Ozlit mags; a tough review of a book that will sell; a bad date movie. infra-dig.ghost.io/so-long-mean...

I wrote for Crikey about the decision to shut Meanjin down - and to sever a connection to a hopeful progressive vision of Australian culture