Advances
Read the advances from the June 2023 issue of ABR.
... (read more)Read the advances from the May 2023 issue of ABR.
... (read more)New board members at ABR
At its recent Annual General Meeting, ABR welcomed two new board members, both of them long associated with the magazine.
Professor Lynette Russell is a pre-eminent anthropological historian whose distinguished contributions to her field have been recognised with an ARC Professorial Fellowship (2011–16) and a current ...
National Cultural Policy
Much has been written since the prime minister launched Labor’s new National Cultural Policy at a popular music venue in Melbourne on 30 January, and Advances suspects there is a lot more to come.
Mostly, the response has been positive – one of relief even. Here, after a decade of neglect, ministerial contempt, and fiscal raids, was ...
Advances for ABR's January-February 2023 issue.
... (read more)Advances from the ABR December 2022 issue.
... (read more)The Mildura Writers’ Festival is always one of the most congenial and stimulating events on our literary calendar. Clive James, our lead reviewer this month, has just agreed to attend this year’s festival and to deliver the 2003 La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture. The lecture will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, 25 July, and the festival will follow that weekend (July 26–27). Clive James (pictured below) will also deliver the lecture in Melbourne soon after the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Full details of both events will follow in the June/July issue. ABR subscribers will be entitled to attend this major lecture gratis.
... (read more)Australia has produced (or welcomed) some fine publishers, but none was more influential on the world stage than Carmen Callil, who has died in London at the age of eighty-four.
... (read more)Welcome to the 250th issue of ABR – or, rather, to the 250th issue of the magazine in its present guise. Some readers may be unfamiliar with the first series, which appeared between 1961 and 1973. It came out of Adelaide under the editorship of Max Harris, Rosemary Wighton and, for a time, Geoffrey Dutton. Kerryn Goldsworthy – herself an Editor for two years in the mid-1980s – writes fascinatingly about those early ABRs in her article ‘The Oily Ratbag and the Recycled Waratah’ (page 23). Like Kerryn, we celebrate the original begetters of ABR, and everyone else who has made the magazine such a success since the present series began in 1978. Independent magazines have never been more vital than now, when a remarkable (even eerie) editorial consensus obtains in the major Australian newspapers. We look forward to bringing you more cogent, questioning writing in coming years, and we trust you enjoy the 250th issue.
... (read more)The ups and downs of biography
Hazel Rowley is the 2007 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecturer. That title is quite a mouthful (the acronym doesn’t bear thinking about), but one that Dr Rowley will handle in her stride, as those who recall her appearances on Australian literary stages will attest.
Dr Rowley – born in England and educated in Australia – taught for many years at Deakin University before moving to the United States. In 1993 she published Christina Stead: A Biography. In her review in The Independent, Doris Lessing said, ‘Christina Stead has long needed a good biographer, and here she is.’ Miegunyah has just issued a revised edition of the biography, in time for Dr Rowley’s Annual Lecture – and her appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
... (read more)