The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards were presented at a dinner last night at Zinc, Federation Square, Melbourne. Premier John Brumby, who presented the awards, noted... Read more |
Chloe Hooper has been awarded the inaugural John Button Prize for The Tall Man (Penguin), presented during the Melbourne Writers Festival. Hooper told an audience... Read more |
The winners of the 2009 Ned Kelly Awards were announced on Friday 28 August, during the Melbourne Writers Festival. Best first fiction went to Nick... Read more |
The five national cultural awards from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre in the Faculty of Arts were presented to six winners from across Australia,... Read more |
New Zealand author Eleanor Catton is on the longlist for the Guardian First Book Award, worth £10,000 (A$19,300), for The Rehearsal (Granta). The award honours... Read more |
Today is the third annual Indigenous Literacy Day, with fundraising events taking place around the country and many booksellers and publishers donating a percentage of... Read more |
Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) 2009 has ended, with record ticket sales in excess of $581,000 and over 50,000 people attending over 350 events over the... Read more |
A full-day digital publishing program was held for the industry and public on Thursday 28 August during the Melbourne Writers Festival. The daytime events were... Read more |
An iPhone version of Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro has been released for download, worldwide, by Cave’s UK publisher Canongate, in cooperation with... Read more |
Kate Eltham, CEO of the Queensland Writers Centre, announced on Thursday during the Melbourne Writers Festival digital publishing program that Australia is to have its... Read more |
Hardie Grant Publishing has announced it has agreed to acquire Universal Publishers from Sensis. Established as Gregory’s in Sydney in 1934 and with the addition... Read more |
The cabinet response to the Productivity Commission’s recommendation that Australia remove parallel import restrictions on books may come sooner than originally anticipated, with some indications cabinet... Read more |
As the 4 September deadline for opting into or out of the Google Settlement approaches, the New Zealand Society of Authors has expressed shock that... Read more |
Booksellers New Zealand (Booksellers NZ) has announced that the New Zealand Book Awards will next year feature ‘fewer categories, more judges and bigger prizes’, following... Read more |
The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (NZETC), affiliated with Victoria University in Wellington, has launched a collection of 1150 free downloadable ebooks. The ebooks, which... Read more |
The Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has recommended the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) give retailers five years to phase in a 200% Sunday penalty... Read more |
Author John Flanagan was announced as the 2009 National Literacy Ambassador during the current National Literacy and Numeracy Week (NLNW), by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The... Read more |
The newly formed Australian Children’s Literature Alliance (ACLA) has announced that its website will be launched in October. ‘The website will be a "one-stop shop"... Read more |
The shortlist for the Colin Roderick Award, for the best book on an Australian topic published in 2008, has been announced. The Award received a... Read more |
The Brisbane Writers Festival (BWF) kicks off next Wednesday 9 September, running until Sunday 13 September, with over 250 local and international writers. The festival... Read more |
The 2009 Australian Christian Literature Awards (for a Christian work by an Australian author, published in Australia) have been announced. The first place prize for Book of... Read more |
The Australian Writer’s Guild (AWG) Annual AWGIE Awards were held in Sydney last week. Patricia Cornelius received the Richard Wherrett Prize for excellence in playwriting,... Read more |
Prime Minister’s shortlist coming soonThe fiction and nonfiction shortlists for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards will be announced by Minister for the Arts Peter Garrett... Read more |
Among the many stories from the international book scene added to our Around the World blog in the past week: Ebooks could kill hardbacks, warns... Read more |
In rights news this week: FictionHarperCollins has sold Kylie Chan’s ‘Dark heavens’ trilogy to the UK; Linda Jaivin’s A Most Immoral Woman to Hungary; Karen... Read more |
Authors on tour from September to November: September Jeb Brugmann, UQP, (Welcome to the Urban Revolution) Joris Luyendijk, Scribe (Fit to Print) Phillip Karl, Cadmos... Read more |
‘We should never forget that a language isn’t just a dialect, it is a whole way of looking at the world, the universe…’–author Richard Flanagan... Read more |
Crime writer, forensic anthropologist and academic Kathy Reichs’ 206 Bones comes number one this week in the Highest New Entries chart. The White Queen by... Read more |
Thomas Keneally’s fervour for Australian history has resulted in what will be a three-volume series entitled ‘Australians’. The first volume Australians: Origins to Eureka has... Read more |
Trade events coming up over the next week, as shown on our events calendar, include: Indigenous Literacy Day, 2 September Digital Publishing Forum–workshop, forum and... Read more |
Senator Ted Kennedy has died, aged 77. As well as his forthcoming memoir True Compass, Kennedy wrote various other titles including Decisions for a Decade:... Read more |
Author and journalist Dominick Dunne has died, aged 83. His books include, An Inconvenient Woman and A Season in Purgatory. Too Much Money: A Novel,... Read more |
Author and illustrator Karla Kuskin has died, aged 77. She wrote many books for children including Soap Soup; In the Middle of the Trees and... Read more |
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Author and editor Fred Brenchley has died, aged 67. One of his best known books was Stoker’s Submarine.
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Sheila Lukins, co-author of The Silver Palate Cookbook and The New Basics Cookbook has died, aged 66.
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