Hidden Author
Why do you write?
I feel deeply alive when I am being creative, despite the frustrations. I love the challenge of trying to find the right words and turning language into song.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Some of my dream landscapes have been both the most exquisitely beautiful and the most terrifying places I have ever seen. But mostly my dreams are common anxiety ones about snakes and being nake ... (read more)
Behind the screen
Dear Editor,
Questions of objectivity and subjectivity are a burden borne equally by anthologist and reviewer, so it was with some surprise that I read Chris Flynn’s oddly unsympathetic and bathetic review of two recent collections in ABR (February 2011). Flynn seems under the common misapprehension that two books reviewed in the one piece need to be presented in opposit ... (read more)
ABR is now online
This month we launch our online edition. ABR OE, which complements but in no way replaces the print version, is probably the most important innovation at ABR since its revival in 1978. With this additional resource, ABR is well placed to maximise its potential and reach those readers and institutions that prefer electronic forms.
Much work has gone into ensuring that th ... (read more)
Fred Williams and Arnold Shore Dear Editor,
Felicity St John Moore, in her review (November 2010) of Arnold Shore: Pioneer Modernist, by Rob Haysom, makes the Modernist connection between the work of Arnold Shore’s ‘scrubby river bank’ landscapes and Fred Williams’s ‘sapling forest fence-like landscapes’, his Sherbrooke Forest series 1959–62, ‘which laid the foundations of his ... (read more)
Takolander’s prize
Maria Takolander – a poet and academic at Deakin University – has won the 2010 ABR Short Story Competition, worth $2000. The judges, Chris Flynn and Peter Rose, were impressed, and amused, by her story ‘A Roānkin Philosophy of Poetry’, an artful take on academic intrigue and absurdism. It appears here.
All seven shortlisted stories appear here in their entir ... (read more)
The ABR Patrons Program has transformed the magazine and greatly benefited Australian writers and freelance writers. At a time of real financial difficulty for many writers and diminishing paid freelance work elsewhere, our generous Patrons have enabled us to increase our payments substantially, to diversify our programs, and to foster brilliant new writing. We pay for everything we publish, and w ... (read more)