Caro Llewellyn is the author of four works of non-fiction, including her Stella Prize-shortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass (2019).  For more than three decades, she has worked with writers variously in publishing and as a festival director and human rights advocate in Australia, France, and the United States, where she lives. Love Unedited, her first novel, is published this month.

In Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

The most famous blackboard in the world resides in Oxford’s History of Science Museum. It was salvaged from the cleaners after Albert Einstein gave an Oxford lecture in 1931, and I confess to being one of the many visitors to gaze upon it with awe. It is a talisman, its continuing existence a cultural recognition of the thrall, and importance, of genius.

The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History announced itself in 2001 as ‘a landmark publication, the first such work of reference for any Australian state or territory’. This new edition, which adds entries, updates others, and lands with a thump at almost 200 pages more than the previous volume, is especially timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which magnified awareness of the differences between the histories and cultures of the Australian states.

In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word ‘hangry’, defined as ‘bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger’. Incidentally, the word ‘mansplain’ was also added in 2018. If you are not familiar with this one, I am sure there is a man nearby who will be happy to enlighten you. Reading Monika Kim’s début novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, I began to wonder whether we may now need a word to describe the inverse state of being ‘hungry as a result of being bad-tempered or irritable’. Some onomatopoeic portmanteau of ‘rage’ and ‘ravening’, perhaps?

Adrian is a professor at a top Australian university and his specialty is death. He lectures on it, writes books on it. Both his parents died when he was a child, one by suicide, but those are long-forgotten events that have nothing to do with his life’s work.

What’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.

Eileen Chong is an award-winning poet of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan descent. She is the author of eleven books. Her most recent book is We Speak of Flowers. She lives and works on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation.

Just a few years ago, retiring after sixteen years as Germany’s chancellor (2005-21), Angela Merkel was praised to the skies as a stateswoman who represented all that was admirable in a (semi-)united Europe. Now her reputation has taken a nosedive (‘Angela who?’ The Economist asked, tongue in cheek, last October). That’s an occupational hazard for politicians, and Merkel, as a seasoned professional, knew the score. Still, she deserves to be remembered, if only because in 2015 she did something that seasoned professionals very rarely do: ignoring the risks, she took an important political decision for moral reasons. That decision was to open Germany’s doors to thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East – in the end almost a million – desperately trying to enter Europe via the Mediterranean.

Colm Tóibín has that special distinction among contemporary writers of being both a first-rate novelist and an acutely discerning critic. In recent years, as well as publishing some magnificent novels, among them Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024), he has written searching critical studies of other writers, including Elizabeth Bishop (2015). His latest critical work, On James Baldwin, was published in 2024 to coincide with the centenary of Baldwin’s birth. It grew out of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities that Tóibín delivered at Brandeis University, but it also draws on a long and passionate engagement with Baldwin’s work, including an essay on Baldwin and Barack Obama published in the New York Review of Books in 2008.