Reviews & News
Review by Laurie Steed on the Writing WA website 11 September 2024
Notes of the empty grandstand When I was a child, before I had been up in an aeroplane, I was taken to the upper deck of the new grandstand on the outskirts of our town. It was a near vertiginous experience. A teetering open slope exposed to the raw elements. Rain. Ferocious gales. From my […]
Why poetry? If you ask that question, you’re already in the room. 20 years ago, Tom Shapcott told me how he once had an eye on becoming a composer instead of a writer. During his stint in National Service, he realised the economy and weight of poetry could be carried in a notebook in his […]
delivered on Friday 23 August 2024 at Gleebooks Sydney I acknowledge we are meeting tonight on the land of the Gadigal People, I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, as well as to emerging leaders. I also thank the Traditional Custodians for caring for Country for thousands of generations. Aboriginal and Torres […]
Reviews coming in for Allan’s new book: Hamish McDonald in Inside Story Frank Bongiorno in The Conversation https://theconversation.com/australia-fears-being-abandoned-by-america-but-do-the-two-countries-need-each-other-232517 A podcast on The Odd Couple: Allan Behm discusses his book with Mark Kenny. https://www.anu.edu.au/alumni/events/meet-the-author-allan-behm
UPDATED! A new interview with New Zealand Radio to add to Dom’s recent interviews about Excitable Boy. Firstly, with Richard Fidler on Conversations (ABC RN) https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/dominic-gordon-excitable-boy-risk-redemption/103925976 And with Andy Park on The Drawing Room (ABC RN) https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/drawingroom/dominic-gordon-author-excitable-boy-/103786780 And this new one from the Nine to Noon program on Radio NZ: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018948001/dominic-gordon-on-a-lifetime-of-risk
Here is one by Will Yeoman, published on the Writing WA website: and another by Sam Ryan at Australian Book Review: What time is it? Two very different collections about identity by Sam Ryan • June 2024, no. 465 Identity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped […]
I ask Upswell authors to prepare a letter to readers who subscribe to annual packages of books they have been included in with an insight to their book or their approach or whatever they wish to share. April and May have been extremely intense months of activity and deadlines–and success for a number of Upswell […]
Days into the life of Sam Elkin’s wonderful first book in the world, reviewers are loving it. I’ll keep updating here: Starting with a feature piece by Sam himself in The Guardian on The Moment I Knew: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/05/the-moment-i-knew-she-stood-up-in-court-and-put-on-the-performance-of-a-lifetime Review in The Saturday Paper 11/5/24 by Stephen A. Russell Sam Elkin jumped ship from a “cushy” […]
We’ve been receiving some excellent reviews of our April 2024 debut book of narrative nonfiction. Here are a few– NEW: in ABR August issue, a review by Michael Winkler: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/1005-august-2024-no-467/12922-michael-winkler-reviews-excitable-boy-essays-on-risk-by-dominic-gordon From The Guardian Australia by Catriona Menzies-Pike https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/03/excitable-boy-by-dominic-gordon-review-punchy-tales-of-masculinity-sex-and-violence Catriona also provided a further set of responses on her Substack newsletter Infra-Dig, shared with her permission […]
Coming to the end of its first month and Abbas El-Zein’s wonderful new book that riffs on language and growing up in a multilingual family in Lebanon has been gathering some excellent reviews. Here are two of them: Read the full ABC review by Declan Fry here at the link: From the Sydney Morning Herald […]
Swamphen, Vol. 10 2024 ASLEC-ANZ[Review] Hayley Singer, Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead.Upswell, 2023, 168pp. DEBORAH WARDLEUniversity of Melbourne and RMIT Most of the ever-growing body of creative and critical literature that explores human andnonhuman animal relationships addresses the various ways that humans think about andconnect to living beings. Scholars focus on the lives […]
A review of Trust alongside Dr. Ahona Guha’s book Reclaim by Jenny Hedley. Two books in the general sphere of discussing coercive control and complex trauma. Read it here: https://shorturl.at/mowAX “As opposed to an easy-to-diagnose event of physical assault, relational trauma often involves an accumulation of near misses, situations that would reveal a perpetrator’s true […]
Worth a listen! Magdalena Ball is a champion of Australian writers and poets and her website Compulsive Reader is a rich resource fuelled by her passion. Click below: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/compulsivereader/episodes/Robbie-Coburn-on-Ghost-Poetry-e2go3v3
By Candida Baker in the Sydney Morning Herald/The Age on 16 March 2024 https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/can-horses-and-poetry-save-a-soul-robbie-coburn-thinks-so-20240311-p5fbj1.html
Have a read here of Robbie speaking with Jordyn Grubisic in the North Central Review newspaper:
The 2023 Victorian Community History Awards were presented at the Arts Centre Melbourne on the 2nd of February 2024 by Public Record Office Victoria in partnership with the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. Kath Kenny was awarded the History Publication award for her Upswell Publishing book Staging a Revolution: When Betty Rocked the Pram (2022). […]
I love the so-called long tail in publishing and was really delighted to read Magdalena Ball’s response to Simon Tedeschi’s first book, Fugitive, some 19 months after its release. I always get a surge of excitement when I read that name — Compulsive Reader — because that is what I am in my best days […]
Limited, but hopefully attractive. Aiming to clear some space in my spare room so that I can welcome a house guest again during my lifetime! What do you think? Postage is a flat rate of $7.00 for any quantity before 8 January 2024 1.These books (link in title) for $15.00 each (50% to 40% discount): […]
Delighted to have four Upswell books included here, as selected by some wonderful Australian writers as standouts in 2023. (according to Helen Garner, Lucy Treloar, Alexis Wright and Amanda Lohrey. )
ESSAY COLLECTION Intimate encounters An excavation of the past by Francesca Sasnaitis • December 2023, no. 460 The interconnected essays in Gemma Nisbet’s début collection, The Things We Live With, revolve around a premise that is as familiar as Marcel Proust’s madeleines or W.G. Sebald’s images: that things – objects, documents, photographs, even colours – evoke memories of […]
An episode from Eleanor Hogan’s Book Talk with Eleanor speaking with Luke Scholes, co-editor with John Carty.
Congratulations to Scott-Patrick Mitchell! A huge achievement to be one of 30 authors shortlisted in a field of 643! (more information below)
writingwa.org Reviewed on 31 October 2023 CLEAN Author: Scott-Patrick Mitchell Publisher: Upswell Publishing Published: March 2022 Genre: Poetry Tagged: collection, poems, poetry Anyone who ever made anything worthwhile is or was an addict of sorts. In this impressive first (full-length) collection, Scott-Patrick Mitchell (hereafter SPM) brings us news from hell. And it’s good. I’m thinking the book’s three sections roughly corresponding to the […]
I ask my authors to write a letters to the subscribers of the book packages I offer each year. I thought I should share the letter written by Stuart Barnes at the start of 2023 as Like to the Lark was arriving into the world. I think it gives the sense of the textures contained […]
BIG NEWS TODAY!!! This message from the University of Melbourne:Please join us in congratulating Stuart Barnes, winner of the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize for an original work of verse or poetry.Barnes’ winning work, Like to the Lark (Upswell Publishing), is described by the Prize Selection Committee as filled with “extraordinary poems, which draw their […]
Have a listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/lifematters/gemma-nisbet-things-we-live-with/102932082
UPDATE 6 October Admissions has just won the: Mental Health Matters Media and the Arts Award finalists: –The Black Box Mental Health Project – Core Community Services –Admissions + MAD Poetry – Red Room Poetry –It’s a Mind Field! And Admissions won today! Congrats to the three editors and all of the contributors!.An illuminating, beautiful, […]
OUT IN OCTOBER! in Books + Publishing on 30 August. Follow link or read below: Gemma Nisbet is a writer and journalist who holds onto things, but this book isn’t about hoarding. It’s not even a self-help antidote to ‘Marie Kondo-ing’ your stuff. In this collection of essays, Nisbet allows her things to spark memories […]
https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/book-review-prudish-nation-paul-dalgarno-2658861/ By Nanci Nott
https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/get-involved/awards-and-fellowships/queensland-literary-awards/judith-wright-calanthe-award-poetry
https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/5119/dot-circle-26-frame-the-making-of-papunya-tula-art/ By Una Rey in Artlink (August 2023)
Waverley Council is delighted to announcethe longlist for this year’s Mark and Evette MoranNib Literary Award Australian writers and their publishers from around the country and overseas submitted a record 239 entries for this year’s Mark & Evette Moran Literary Award, now offering a $40,000 major prize. This year’s judges, poet Jamie Grant, writer and novelist Katerina […]
In its first month of life this little book is getting great attention and lots of love from readers and reviews everywhere. Here are a few: https://2ser.com/episodes/final-draft-1000am-22nd-jul-2023/ Andrew Pople demonstrating enthusiasm! And Vincent O’Donnell at around the 22 minute mark:
In February 2024, we are publishing the final book by poet Robert Adamson, Birds and Fish. Here is a link to an an article by American poet and publisher Devin Johnston about this book, recently published by Pen International. Devin worked with Robert in his last year to prepare this manuscript, a selection of his […]
Anxious in a Sweet Store (Anna Jacobson, Upswell) 4 July 2023 Books+Publishing Anxious in a Sweet Store is the playful and nostalgic second full-length poetry collection from writer and artist Anna Jacobson. Divided into four parts, each named after a classic sweet treat, Jacobson’s collection explores themes of family, food, culture and mental illness, creating […]
Review by Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll Prudish NationPaul Dalgarno, Upswell, $29.99 The question of whether we are a prudish nation is largely examined here through the prism of non-monogamy. But Dalgarno, a polyamorist, casts his net far wider than that. He interviewed more than 30 writers with varying shades of sexuality and the result is a […]
In a seminal paper from 1914, called On Narcissism, Freud turns to the romantic poet Heinrich Heine and his Schöpfungsliede, Creation songs, from 1844. Freud is working on the question of love: Why does man in the end give up his narcissism and let the love flow on to other objects than self? Well, he […]
Just announced this week! Thrilled to see Scott-Patrick’s debut volume of poetry on this list. Ceremony t6o happen in June 2023–stay tuned! The Premier’s Prize for Book of the Year, sponsored by Writing WA ($15,000)
Kathleen kindly gave permission to reproduce her excellent launch speech for Annette Trevitt for her first book, a work of narrative nonfiction I Had a Father in Karratha. The launch was at Readings Carlton bookshop on 3 April 2023. Well, isn’t it exciting to be here to celebrate the launch of Annette Trevitt’s ‘I Had […]
19 April 2023 JR Burgmann’s masterful debut novel is a speculative climate epic forecasting events across the 21st century. In a book spanning multiple generations, family members each inherit escalating, catastrophic change. It’s also a literary triumph. Every line dazzled and struck me as poetry, and any given page or chapter could easily stand alone. […]
Like to the Lark by Stuart Barnes Reviewed by Magdalena Ball https://compulsivereader.com/ Like to the LarkBy Stuart BarnesUpswell PublishingPaperback, 100 pages, Jan 2023, ISBN13: 9780645536980 Like to the Lark is a fitting follow-on to Stuart Barnes’ debut Glasshouses, which won the 2015 Thomas Shapcott award. The book is full of tight structuring and a clever use of constraints, with […]
The 21st century is when it all goes wrong. All the sins since the Industrial Revolution manifest in calamity and collapse. The planet is on track to overshoot, missing deadlines by which some of the disaster could be averted. Yet people go on living, if they’re lucky, and loving through this all-encompassing catastrophe. This is […]
from The Canberra Times by Jasper Lindell 25 March 2023 On those regular enough nights when, after work, I cannot be bothered cooking very much, I know I can buy a roast chicken in a little plastic bag sitting in a supermarket warmer for little more than $10. The gnarly business of killing the chicken, […]
from The Conversation 21 March 2023 by Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney For at least the past decade, writers and critics have been debating the capacity of literary fiction to represent the realities of climate change. Some argue fiction is one of our best tools for reckoning with a […]
Kerry Greer reviews Clean by Scott-Patrick Mitchell A Poetics of Renewal: Addiction, Recovery, and the Australian Gothic in Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s Clean Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness […]
(I have republished this statement after the current story in The Monthly March 2023 but it is dated 17 June 2022.) The events of the past fortnight in the media and amplified on social media have been personally distressing as well as concerning for my very-new publishing venture. I had worked with John Hughes on […]
Glass Houses (Anne Coombs, Upswell) 31 January 2023 Books+Publishing Glass Houses is Anne Coombs’s (Sex and Anarchy: The life and death of the Sydney Push) posthumous final novel. Perched on a ‘neglected hillside’ near the fictional town of Glaston in rural NSW is neo-Gothic mansion Glastonbridge, the imposing yet derelict centrepiece of the story. Many […]
I Had a Father in Karratha (Annette Trevitt, Upswell) 21 February 2023 Books+Publishing When her father dies, Annette Trevitt spends two-and-a-half years organising the detritus of his life in a remote WA mining town. I Had a Father in Karratha is a memoir about Trevitt taking responsibility for a parent who eschewed responsibility, unpicking and unravelling […]
From Forbes.com 30 December 2022 12 Must Have Books And Podcasts For Leaders In 2023 Michael Sheldrick, Contributor Global Citizen, Contributor Group No Enemies No Friends: Restoring Australia’s Global Relevance, by Allan Behm Talking of Australia’s role, I greatly enjoyed reading Behm’s No Enemies, No Friends, after it was recommended to me by a friend […]
Hello! If you are a seasonal gift-giving type and you are having trouble after leaving your decisions too late, here’s an idea. Order an Upswell book as a gift and I’ll send you this gift card (print and give) and send the books to your loved one (or even a little bit loved) immediately or […]
Upswell Subscriber letters series 2022 Loop Tracks germinated at lunchtime on a Friday, late in 2016, in a swish Japanese restaurant in Auckland, New Zealand. We were a group of girlfriends having a rare catch up. All the details of that afternoon are as clear in my memory now as they were on the day. […]
Upswell Subscriber letters 2022 March 2022 I knew Marjon’s name (it is very distinctively long!) from her first book of poems from 2018 when I received an email from her offering this manuscript to me during a flight to Sydney in April 2021. I was travelling to visit a beloved friend after dramatic surgery and […]
Given the extraordinary attention to different poetic forms displayed so thrillingly in Stuart Barnes’s forthcoming volume Like to the Lark (February 2023), he has added this note at the end of the book. We are reproducing it here alongside Stuart’s conversation with Meesha Williams in the brand-new Upswell Podcast series. Notes on Form Stuart Barnes […]
Crystal Palace & Courtyard, Carlton North, 27 November 2022. I’m Prithvi Varatharajan. I’m honoured to be launching Marjon Mossammaparast’s second poetry collection, And to Ecstasy. Like Marjon, I’m really pleased that her publisher Terri-ann White is here in Melbourne from Perth. And thanks to you all for coming here this Sunday afternoon, to celebrate this […]
Since I started Upswell I have asked all authors to write an introductory letter to our subscribers with some illumination or detail about the finished book. I left the brief wide open, and the authors have tackled it in a range of ways, as you’d imagine: where the initial spark came from; influences, quirky stories […]
I asked Tom Lee to give readers an entry point for this splendid second novel, released in November 2022. Here it is. “It would be hard to make a work of fiction sound appealing if the author said that it was about anthropotechnic perception. Not love, death, coincidence or a pressing issue of social concern. […]
We were delighted to celebrate with Allan Behm the shortlisting of his excellent book in the inaugural Australian Political Book of the Year award on 9 November 2022 in Canberra. The Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers presented the award to Dean Ashenden for his book Telling Tennant’s Story: the Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence […]
Have a quick look through Alchemy, by Kate Forsyth & Wendy Sharpe.
Westerly, October 2022. By Rachel Watts
Communes, polyamory, and the history of the fraternal society officially known as the Royal Antediluvian Order of the Buffaloes — aka the Buffalo Club — are among the subjects probed by Sally Olds in her first book. A collection of six incisive and intellectually dextrous essays, it sees the Melbourne-based writer and critic considering topics […]
In Australian Book Review August 2022 issue by Jennifer Harrison Heels on the throat of song: exploring the limits of poetry’s expressivity (a review of two books: see also Marjon Mossamaparast) The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. […]
In Australian Book Review August 2022 issue by Jennifer Harrison Marjon Mossammaparast’s earlier book, That Sight, won the 2018 Mary Gilmore award and was commended in several other awards. I was impressed by the way these new poems reach into spiritual traditions, such as that of the Bahá’í faith, yet also explore identity. This anchoring […]
From The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age by Lucy Sussex and Steven Carroll Non-fiction pick of the week Hard Joy: Life and WritingSusan Varga, Upswell, $29.99 Susan Varga’s distinctive memoir (incorporating her taut but resonant poetry) comes over as an effortless blend of the epic and intimate, and easy to read – but it was hard […]
In Australian Book Review, September issue, by Sarah Gory: a long and sparkling review. Here’s an excerpt: “Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a […]
“The Melbourne-based critic’s debut runs a gamut of social scenes (most of them pretty club-heavy): secret societies to art fairs to crypto. Every piece in the collection – subtitled “essays on work, leisure & loose living” – asks you to think harder about the ways we earn money, party, and look out for each other. […]
“The sublime nature of Mitchell’s work is evident throughout, for the poet constantly juggles elements of both the picturesque and the sinister.” Holden Walker. Full review in Mascara here: “The inimitable SPM’s first full-length collection is a fear-and-loathing-journey-book through addiction and back again. These are beautifully written, harrowing, wise, tightly-wound poems of witness, survival and […]
“Female performers at the turn of the 20th century found both joy and frustration in theatre. If you thought Deadwood was a lawless, heartless place, try early Australia.” “Connolly’s ancestors, male & female on both sides were musical, dramatic, creative, talented & driven. What would a woman do with her talents? Even if married to […]
Nature writing seems so often to categorise itself, and that for me is ultimately its limitation as an activist mode, but, at its best, it breaks such bounds and articulates the unspoken spaces between the natural and human worlds, and respects the segues between them. Gregory Day manages to achieve this form of “nature writing” […]
The events of the past fortnight in the media and amplified on social media have been personally distressing as well as concerning for my very-new publishing venture. I had worked with John Hughes on four books before The Dogs. I take my role as a publisher very seriously in all aspects: primarily as a partnership between […]
Responses by John Hughes and Terri-ann White regarding The Dogs. I’ve never written a book like The Dogs before that has taken so many different forms over so many years. My books are for the most part short and written in a burst. But for the past fifteen years, my previous four books have each intruded into it […]
“Wanting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position […]
Review in The Saturday Paper by Leah Jing McIntosh, September 2021 “A slow burn, The Sweetest Fruits is a thoughtful layering of fictions and truths, a novel that will most certainly dazzle.”
Review in Australian Book Review by Libby Robin March 2022 “This book is about Africa but also about the stifling limits of New York that drove Akeley, his two wives, and JT to different sorts of madness. Fevers are often associated with African jungles, but the expectations of the urban jungle of Manhattan added another level of craziness. As museums […]
Review in Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, January 2022 “Selim Ozdogan is a writer of the Turkish diaspora, born in Germany. The first in a trilogy, this novel is realist, focused on aspirational workers. It is also a devastating critique of entitled patriarchy and its consequences: smothered women. The blacksmith Timur is a loving father who […]
A Q&A with Belinda Probert.
The astounding popularity of book series such as Harry Potter and Game of Thrones comes at a cost, writes publisher Terri-ann White.
Saving our endangered Indigenous languages and the Illustrated Handbook of Yolŋu Sign Language of North East Arnhem Land. On the Crocodile Islands, in the shade, on a beach, near a tin shed with no water and power sits an old woman in her late seventies. At this time, 1993 only 300 words of her language were […]
As everyone who knows me knows, Ross Gibson is one of my favourite writers, thinkers, filmmakers, and curators. He’s also one of my favourite people. He has written this poem for the audience of this newsletter. For more Ross Gibson work please visit his website.
A video essay by Adrian Martin & Cristina Álvarez López, critics and artists and practitioners of this intriguing form incorporating audiovisual elements to the study of an audiovisual object. In short, cutting out the middle-matter of words to present a collage entirely self-contained. They write about their approach here, in the Sydney Review of Books.
This excerpt from Maria Tumarkin is from a book I published in 2018 at UWAP, Dangerous Ideas about Mothers, and was later published by Sydney Review of Books. It is reproduced here courtesy the author, UWAP and SRB as part of Upswell’s relationship with SRB. Maria Tumarkin is one of the boldest and most scintillating writers of our […]
Andra Kins is one of the pioneers of the public art movement in WA and believes passionately in the positive effects of the complex trans-disciplinary collective process involved in commissioning and creating public art. After completing a first-class honours degree in architecture at the University of Western Australia Andra participated in establishing the Mundaring Sculpture Park, was Director of […]
Michael Bradley I published lawyer and writer Michael Bradley’s first book, Coniston, in late 2019 at UWAP. As an adult Michael realised his education in Australian history had skipped over a great deal of crucial detail, including massacres of Aboriginal people in the twentieth century. Michael writes for a number of publications, including Crikey, on […]
Tom Lee As another opportunity to spruik the pleasures and richness of the online publication Sydney Review of Books, I present this essay by Sydney writer Tom Lee in the SRB project series: The Experimental Essay (with its subtitle-description of Conceptual and formal de-tours). Thanks to Editor Catriona Menzies-Pike and the individual authors for permissions […]