The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone ... (read more)
Sarah Kanowski

Sarah Kanowski is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. She is the new editor of Island magazine, the literary quarterly based in Tasmania and addressed to readers and writers across the world. Sarah has worked extensively at ABC Radio National, primarily on the Late Night Live, Saturday Extra, and Encounter programs. She holds a Masters of Philosophy in English Studies from Oxford University. Having begun life as a Queenslander, with time spent in Latin America, she wonders how much further south fate will carry her.
While spying in Scotland in 1706, Daniel Defoe wrote a letter to the queen’s secretary of state explaining his technique: ‘I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way.’ In his energetic and instructive introduction to The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, Adrian Poole takes Defoe’s declaration as a neat summation of the novelist’s method. It was following the success of Robinson Crusoe ... (read more)