Advances: Literary News - June 2009

Ideal climate for writing Climate change poses undoubted challenges for science – and society – but what exactly does the phenomenon mean for Australian cultural life? The University of Melbourne’s inaugural Festival of Ideas, June 15–20, investigates the question, with a program featuring scientists, environmentalists, architects, commentators, gallery directors, novelists and poets. The director, Patrick McCaughey, has secured a keynote address from Miles Franklin winner Kate Grenville, as well as panel appearances from Steven Carroll, Don Watson, Barry Jones, and Lisa Gorton and more over the Festival’s five-day duration. All sessions are free. Full details are available at www.ideas.unimelb.edu.au. J.M. Coetzee’s new book Few recent novels have garnered as many admirers and accolades as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). It won him a second Booker Prize, a few years before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and came to live in Australia. Now Disgrace has been filmed, by Steve Jacobs, with John Malkovich as the ‘disgraced’ academic David Lurie (that’s him on our cover). The Australian season commences on June 18. Generously, our friends at Icon Film Distribution have given us forty double passes to the film for new subscribers. Brian McFarlane praises the film on page 13 (‘Jacobs has taken a masterly novel and made an uncompromisingly brilliant film from this source’). He particularly admires Jacobs’s fidelity to the novelist’s ‘curious tone of objectivity’. Meanwhile, J.M. Coetzee has a new book out in September. Summertime – a memoir which takes his story up to the age of thirty-five – is the sequel to Boyhood (1997), one of the great books about childhood, and Youth (2002), which Jim Davidson, reviewing it in our June–July 2002 issue, found ‘compelling’ and ‘fearfully honest’. No mere ornament There is consensus that philanthropy is of increasing importance to the survival of the arts and the humanities. It’s one of the reasons why ABR is seeking Patrons and other donors (we list our most recent supporters on page 5). ABR was delighted to take part in the second Symposium on Philanthropy and the Humanities, held in late March at the University of Melbourne. The Editor was one of several speakers; others included Michael Gawenda and Iain McCalman. A clear highlight was the keynote address by Professor Malcolm Gillies, formerly a senior musicologist and university administrator in Australia, who is now the Vice-Chancellor and President of City University London. He issued an urbane challenge to the humanities not to rely on nebulous ‘intrinsic values’, but to forge links with all sectors of government and society. Otherwise, he said, the humanities will become irrelevant, purely ornamental, ‘gathering dust on an upper shelf of society’s display cabinet’. We publish Professor Gillies’ timely paper in this issue. Slap on the back for Tsiolkas November 2008 ABR cover star, Christos Tsiolkas, has won this year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for The Slap (Allen & Unwin). Tsiolkas received $20,000. Described by James Ley in his ABR review of the ‘panoramic socialrealist’ novel as Tsiolkas’s ‘mildest book to date’, and a ‘strike at middle-class sensitivities … [that] explores the way that the preciousness and anxiety that surround child rearing is symptomatic of broader cultural tensions’, The Slap has also been shortlisted for this year’s Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and for the Miles Franklin, to be announced on June 18. TNL calling The second issue of Transnational Literature has just ‘gone live’, if that’s what happens to e-journals. Edited by ABR contributor Gillian Dooley, TNL (as it will doubtless become known in this acronymic world) is a freely accessible international journal published twice yearly by the Humanities Research Centre, Flinders University. Highlights include three articles on the ubiquitous Jane Austen – including one by Dr Dooley herself, intriguingly titled ‘Good versus Evil in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat’ – and reviews of several books on Austen. New poetry and short fiction also appear in this issue. As the Editor remarks, ‘Without creative writing we would have nothing to write about’. To subscribe, go to: http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/. ABR and the blogosphere The ABR blog is back with a vengeance, redesigned and boasting several new features. Fresh postings happen two or three times each week. We welcome readers’ comments, which will appear beneath this feature on our website http://australianbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/. The Editor, previously a slightly reluctant blogger, has become positively prolific, with recent posts on the editorial process, the Calibre Prize and the very different gestations in the film and publishing industries. Mark Gomes, who joined us last month as the APA Editorial Intern, wrote about his first week at ABR. Don’t miss ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ each week, the blog for bibliophiles. Changes at ABR It’s all happening, as Bill Lawry has been known to say. We’re currently redesigning the magazine, for a September release. As we consider all the options, we’re keen to hear what ABR readers think. To this end, we are planning a kind of informal focus group. You don’t have to stop drinking or wear nicotine patches or lie in a darkened room for eight hours. All you have to do is proffer your views. We’ll even give you a sandwich. If you would like to reserve a spot, drop a line to Mark Gomes: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Ideal climate for writing

From the New Issue

Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le

The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw