Stinson briefly acknowledges the ‘fantastic’ wins of Melissa Lucashenko for the Miles and Alexis Wright for the Stella (in 2018, for her book Tracker), but seems to regard these as flukes. He ignores the fact that women have won seven of the eight most recent Miles Franklin Awards – an utterly astonishing turnaround in the historical record of the Miles, which before 2012 had awarded the prize to just nine women since it was established in 1957.

I live in the US now, and watch with a growing sense of fear and horror as women’s rights to reproductive care are gradually, methodically, stripped away by the states. Abortion clinics are closed; women are made to wait unreasonable periods of time and travel impossible distances; women in some states are forced to undergo an ultrasound before they can get an abortion, which is not very different from being raped with a thing they euphemistically call a wand, with its magic powers of showing you your own insides.

Margaret Atwood was recently announced as the first author to participate in the Future Library, an unusual publishing project initiated by Scottish artist Katie Paterson. The project will collect a book every year from a different author, but will not publish them until the year 2114. Apparently it doesn’t bother Atwood that she is writing a novel that no-one in her lifetime will be able to read.

My favourite Sydney-vs-Melbourne joke is the one about how in Melbourne, if you have a good idea you start a little magazine; in Sydney, you have a party. As time goes by this seems more and more true to me. But I think of Overland as embracing the best of the celebratory Sydney spirit between […]

Embassytown is perhaps China Miéville’s most self-consciously literary novel, as well as a classic sci-fi space opera set in the distant future on a planet at the edge of mapped space, Areika. The book’s title comes from the name of the enclave inhabited by the human colonists within the larger city that they share with the native Areikei, referred to by humans as ‘Hosts’.