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Picture the moment a reader in Adelaide or Brisbane first spots your novel on a shelf at Readings or Dymocks. They flip it over, read the back cover, and…

For most of his working life, Howard G. Franklin wrote to a deadline. Magazine assignments arrived with due dates stamped on the page, and the novels came with…

Dialect gives fictional speech its social texture. It can locate a character, reveal family history, signal education or exclusion, and distinguish one voice…

My father’s passing changed the meaning of a published book. Before then, publication could feel like a practical achievement: a manuscript completed, edited,…

A novel does not need to seize the reader by the collar on its first page. Sometimes it should offer a chair, pour a cup of tea and allow the room to come into…

A story may begin with an author’s sentences, but it does not become fully alive until someone reads it. The reader supplies attention, memory, imagination and…

An unfinished novel can look like a failure when it is reduced to a date, a number of pages, or a folder that never reached a publisher. From a distance, the…

Every writer who has tried to put a storm on the page knows the temptation of the old moves. The sky darkens. The wind howls. The thunder rolls. The whole…

Picture a Saturday arvo in Melbourne, browsing the shelves at Readings in Carlton. A reader picks up a book about a coastal town in County Clare, flips through…

Writing about Ireland from America is a peculiar act of imagination. The country sits inside American literary memory like an old relative whose stories we…