Commentary

Letters to an Unknown Friend

June 2010, issue no. 322

Commentary

Letters to an Unknown Friend

June 2010, issue no. 322

What a wonderful thing is the essay! What a hymn to the human mind and its vagaries and cogitations – to its humanness. All honour to Australian Book Review and the Cultural Fund of Copyright Agency Limited for celebrating it with the Calibre Prize – and, of course, to our prize-winning hymnists.

To celebrate the essay with this degree of fanfare shows a certain amount of chutzpah, I think – of ‘courage’ in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of the word. (‘A courageous decision, Minister.’)

Robert Dessaix

Robert Dessaix is a broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His most recent books are His most recent book is The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well (2020) and The Pleasures of Leisure (2017). He is also the author of several other books including the autobiography A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), the novels Night Letters (1996) and Corfu (2001), and the travel memoirs Twilight of Love (2004) and Arabesques (2008).