Love Letter to Lola by Carmel Bird

Love Letter to LolaCarmel BirdSpineless WondersReviewed by Joy LawnReleased May 2023PaperbackISBN 9781925052961RRP $24.99Category: Adult Fiction Love Letter to Lola by Carmel Bird (published by Spineless Wonders) (This review was commissioned by Books+Publishing and is reproduced with permission) Carmel Bird was the recipient of the 2016 Patrick White Literary Award and is a respected author of […]

Crows Nest by Nikki Mottram

Crows Nest by Nikki Mottram Author Interview at PaperbarkWords “I guess people usually end up as products of their environment, and in Crows Nest, the women end up becoming victims – usually by being trapped in dysfunctional relationships. And the men metamorphosise into something else.” (Crows Nest) I am loving reading new Australian crime, […]

THE SUN WALKS DOWN

THE SUN WALKS DOWN by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin) Literary fiction review I was privileged to write an advance review about The Sun Walks Down for Books + Publishing (content now unlocked). Here is my additional review for PaperbarkWords blog, with a focus on sun gods, colonisation and art. The Sun Walks Down by […]

Words on the Waves Writers Festival 2022

Words on the Waves Writers Festival 2022 The second Words on the Waves Writers Festival was held on Darkinjung Country on the NSW Central Coast during the first weekend in June 2022. The festival expanded over two venues, Ocean Beach Surf Life Saving Club and Umina SLSC (both at Umina Beach) and was marked by […]

The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott

The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing) Review by Joy Lawn The Rain Heron is literary art. The author has deftly crafted an audacious idea into an original, compelling work. Author Robbie Arnott exploded onto the Australian and global literary scene in 2018 with his debut novel Flames. Flames has been highly recognised, being […]

The Torrent by Dinuka McKenzie

Author Interview for Joy in Books at PaperbarkWords I am very interested in reading Australian crime, particularly novels by women, since becoming a judge of the Davitt Crime Awards. The Torrent is Dinuka McKenzie’s debut novel. It is well constructed and written and is also unputdownable. Protagonist Detective Sergeant Kate Miles is an original character […]

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Book Review: The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki “Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.” (The Book of Form and […]

If You’re Happy by Fiona Robertson

Fiona Robertson joins us at PaperbarkWords to talk about her debut short story collection, If You’re Happy (published by UQP). She has aptly titled this piece, ‘If You’re Happy to Travel‘ A few early readers of If You’re Happy have remarked on the number of countries depicted in the book. When I checked the contents […]

Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature

In exciting news Abdulrazak Gurnah has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was ‘in conversation’ with him at the 2011 Brisbane Writers Festival. He had been nominated for the Booker Prize for Paradise by then (and also the Whitbread) and we discussed his new novel (at the time), The Last Gift (published Bloomsbury) in […]

The Airways by Jennifer Mills

The Airways by Jennifer Mills, published by Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia Literary Fiction, Author Interview “He closed his eyes and concentrated. He inhabited for a time that liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, where the mind began to believe it might wander free of the body. He thought of experiences that he could not quite […]