Accessibility Tools

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

Winning the lottery

Paul Jennings’s unusual new memoir
by
January–February 2021, no. 428

Untwisted: The story of my life by Paul Jennings

Allen & Unwin, $34.99 hb, 336 pp

Winning the lottery

Paul Jennings’s unusual new memoir
by
January–February 2021, no. 428

Paul Jennings’s literary career can be traced back to three whispered words from the author Carmel Bird, who taught him writing at an evening class in Melbourne in 1983. ‘You are good,’ she told him. Jennings was an unpublished forty-year-old at the time, yet within two years Penguin had launched his first short story collection, Unreal!

Jennings recalls this moment with Bird in the opening chapter of Untwisted. It is this memoir’s departure point for charting the English-born writer’s journey from a disrupted, often unpleasant childhood, through a teaching career, and ultimately to his status today as, at seventy-seven, arguably Australia’s greatest living children’s author.

Barnaby Smith reviews 'Untwisted: The story of my life' by Paul Jennings

Untwisted: The story of my life

by Paul Jennings

Allen & Unwin, $34.99 hb, 336 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.