Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Kate Grenville

This week on the ABR Podcast historian Penny Russell reviews Kate Grenville’s new book, a fictional account of her maternal grandmother. In Restless Dolly Maunder, Grenville reckons with the life of a woman who left no written records but whose memory she carries from her childhood. Penny Russell is Professor Emerita at The University of Sydney and an historian of families, intimacy, and social encounters. Listen to Penny Russell’s ‘Mirrors on misery: A brilliant portrait of an unhappy marriage’, published in the September issue of ABR.

... (read more)

I don’t know why some people seem to think voting is a great imposition. I love lining up and watching the person behind the table pick up the ruler and find my name. There’s a little warm glow of being one tiny thread in the great muddled ball of string that is the democratic process. Always, in the queue there’s a particular feeling: pleased, proud, everyone hugging to ourselves the little secret of how we’re going to vote. When my kids were at primary school, I loved helping to person the stall churning out the Democracy Sausages.

... (read more)

Kate Grenville’s new novel, her first in almost a decade, is dedicated to ‘all those whose stories have been silenced’, for which, as its ‘memoirist’–narrator heroine is Elizabeth Macarthur, we might read ‘women’. Did she – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – write what Grenville’s publishers call ‘a shockingly frank secret memoir’? In her ‘Editor’s Note’, Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of there being discovered in the ceiling of a historic Parramatta house under renovation a long-hidden box containing that memoir. In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the book’s end, we are assured that ‘No, there was no box of secrets found in the roof of Elizabeth Farm. I didn’t [as she claimed at the beginning, in her Editor’s Note] transcribe and edit what you’ve just read. I wrote it.’ Perhaps those who thought otherwise failed to observe the book’s epigraph from Elizabeth Macarthur – ‘Do not believe too quickly’ – though whether those words were inscribed by the historic Elizabeth or by Grenville’s fictional one may be a matter for discussion. Apropos of previous books, Grenville the novelist has had disputes with historians about matters of fiction and fact.

... (read more)

Kate Grenville’s publisher wasn’t keen on her writing a book about fragrance. He would have preferred another novel from the author of ...

... (read more)

Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story is one of the great Australian novels of the last thirty years. When it was first published in 1985, it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. The original cover carried a recommendation by Patrick White, Nobel laureate and the greatest writer of any kind Australia has produced. White said ...

I’ve just finished a book about my mother’s life. She was typical of her times in some ways, remarkable and even eccentric in others. When she died ten years ago she left a mass of bits and pieces of memoir. I’ve used them to try to tell the story of a working-class woman riding the waves of change through the twentieth century.

... (read more)

Kate Grenville’s mother, Nance Gee (née Russell), was an extraordinarily resourceful, resilient, and interesting woman. Born in 1912 to ill-matched, working-class parents and surviving a childhood lacking in stability and opportunity, she went on to become an inspirational mother, businesswoman, and teacher. Some years after her death in 2002, Grenville began sor ...

Kate Grenville (1950–) is an award-winning Australia author of fiction, memoir and non-fiction, Kate’s first publication was the short story collection Bearded Ladies (1984). She has gone on to publish a total of thirteen books in the last thirty years including her most recent one, One Life (2015). Several of Kate’s works have been adapted f ...

Sarah Thornhill is the third book in Kate Grenville’s loose trilogy depicting life in the early days after Australia’s settlement. Like the previous novels, The Secret River (2005) and The Lieutenant (2008), Sarah Thornhill fictionalises actual stories of settlement. In the process, Grenville transforms our history into something immediate and tangible, which gives readers the chance to enter our shared past.

... (read more)

We welcome entries in the third ABR Poetry Prize. In its short life, this competition has become one of the most prominent of its kind in the country. Poets have until December 15 to enter the prize, which is worth $2000. Up to six poems will be shortlisted in the March 2007 issue; the winner will be announced one month later. Full details appear on page 42. The entry form is also available on our website, or on request. The previous winners were Stephen Edgar and Judith Bishop. Advances was pleased to see that Judith Beveridge has included Edgar’s prize-winning poem ‘The Man on the Moon’ in The Best Australian Poetry 2006 (UQP) — one of eight poems in the anthology that were first published in ABR.

... (read more)
Page 1 of 2