Writing & News

Launch speech for Ann Shenfield’s ‘A Treatment’ by Helena Sandahl. Readings Bookshop Carlton 30 March 2023

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 […]

Clean. The book that keeps on giving!

Book launch for Pastures of Healing by Denis Glennon 30 May 2023

Clean makes it onto another shortlist! Congrats, Scott-Patrick Mitchell.

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)

Launch speech by Kathleen Mary Fallon for ‘I Had a Father in Karratha’

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 […]

Review of Children of Tomorrow in ArtsHub by Megan Payne

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. […]

A review of Stuart Barnes. Magdalena Ball on Compulsive Reader

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 […]

Another review of Children of Tomorrow in the Canberra Times (1/4/2023)

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 […]

Review of Abandon Every Hope: essays for the dead by Hayley Singer

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, […]

Review of Children of Tomorrow by JR Burgmann

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 […]

Review of Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s CLEAN (2022) by Kerry Greer in Plumwood Mountain.

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 […]

Statement about Upswell Publishing and The Dogs

(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 […]