Surely every university’s creative writing anthology has the tagline ‘these are fresh voices’ plastered somewhere in its pages. In Blood & Bone, the thirty-eighth UTS Writers’ Anthology, this freshness is not some marketing cliché but apropos, characterised by all the gory atavism of its title and the recurrent theme of the body throughout its pages. These eclectic pieces explore the tension and liminality between the dichotomies that construct our reality: there is growth and atrophy; human and non-human; mind and body. Frequently, the contributors return to the medical clinic, but also to the digital world of AI, ChatGPT, and social media.

The title and cover of Great Game On tell us that a struggle is underway between Russia and China for supremacy in Central Asia. But by the time the reader has reached the book’s end, they are persuaded that China has already won and that there is more than just Central Asia at stake.

In The Scent of Oranges, Kathy George writes a new story for Nancy, the warm-hearted street girl in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). With a deftness that commands admiration, George sutures her story to parts of the novel written by Dickens almost two centuries ago, maintaining the integrity of all his scenes involving Nancy, preserving, while lightly adapting, much of his dialogue; borrowing some of his imagery, but interweaving those scenes with others of her own invention. It is so skilfully done that the stitches barely show, so it takes some time to realise just how much of this admirably Dickensian dialogue is in fact dialogue written by Dickens.

Emily Tsokos Purtill’s first novel, Matia, is both ambitiously expansive and, narrated as a series of moments in time, deftly miniaturised. Spanning four individual decades from 1940 to 2070, and moving between continents, it details the lives of four generations of Greek-Australian mothers and daughters. Unlike a conventional family saga, the novel has the associative structure of memory, moving through time and space in unpredictable ways, creating both threads of continuity and a sense of fragmentation. The narrative focus on women charts the struggle for agency through the eyes of the four women, each of them bequeathed a bracelet – the Greek word matia of the book’s title – intended to ward off the evil eye. As such, the modern concept of individualism collides with the realms of prophecy and superstition, producing a fascinating exploration of the crucial issues of female agency and choice.

On 26 October 2002, two days before closing a deal to purchase Twitter for US$44 billion (A$61.4 billion), Elon Musk walked into its San Francisco headquarters carrying a white porcelain sink. He walked up to an unattended front desk in the lobby and said, to no one: ‘You can’t help but let that sink in.’ Of course, he didn’t really say this to no one. His triumphant entrance at Twitter HQ was staged, the video shared with his 120 million Twitter followers, with the phrase: ‘Let That Sink In!’

Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR’s 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

You can’t tell the story of American cinema without Al Pacino, but it has taken him eighty-four years to get around to telling his own. Plenty of celebrities have put pen to paper in an effort to enshrine their life story well before becoming an octogenarian, but Sonny Boy, Pacino’s delightfully ramshackle and deeply heartfelt memoir, instantly benefits from feeling like a full, close-to-finished story. ‘I’m a man who has limited time left,’ he says, explaining his desire to share parts of himself that his public persona might have never fully conveyed, things that slipped through the cracks in an otherwise highly visible and well-documented life.

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its twenty-first year, attracted 1,171 entries, from twenty-nine countries. We thank our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – who have shortlisted the following poems:

This is a brave book, for it is the biography of a phantom. Archives hold ample evidence of the many professional achievements of the surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend, but of him personally almost nothing is known. Townsend left little trace of his passions, frustrations, or loves, the substance that animates biographies. A letter that Townsend wrote to his brother in 1839 is the only item of his private correspondence known to exist. And yet somehow the book works, and brilliantly so. Peter Crowley has written a compelling account of a remarkable figure in Australian history.

Every December, great white sharks leave the bountiful coasts of California to congregate at a small patch of the Pacific Ocean located approximately midway between Hawaii and Mexico. As the sharks have been diving there, they have been teaching scientists that the area now known as the White Shark Café is much livelier, and more nourishing, than previously thought. Meanwhile, a supposedly humdrum stretch of the deep North Atlantic seabed called the Porcupine Abyssal Plain has been revealed as adorned with rolling hills, some of them hundreds of metres in height, where seabed organisms thrive. Ten thousand kilometres south and east of the Plain, the Indian Ocean’s Saya de Malha Bank supports the largest seagrass meadow in the world, spectacular corals and coralline algae, and, in surrounding depths, pygmy whales, flying fish, and untold others. ‘Some of the most extraordinary, most biodiverse parts of our planet are on the high seas’, writes the science journalist Olive Heffernan. ‘Yet they are unknown to most.’