In 2009, my Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia was 72 hours of guilt. I was up all night working, fielding emails from my boss as she trekked through the fall-out of Padang City following the West Sumatran earthquake in search of solutions. It wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough: 1 117 dead, 1 […]

Young Emerging Writers Night at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival Much is being made at the moment about the number of students enrolling in creative writing courses across our fair land. In fact, it is fair to say that in the next decade Australia’s biggest challenge won’t be overpopulation; it will be a severe skills […]

Sunday 29 August. Kim Stanley Robinson sat calmly at the front of the vast reaches of BMW edge. Lucy Sussex – a longtime supporter of Overland – interviewed Robinson in a freewheeling discussion about his work and opinions. It’s not surprising that that the hall wasn’t full: Robinson was the Guest of Honour at the […]

MWF session: A year for Australian writing This session had it all, from heckling to backslapping, from scholarly commentary to dogged insistence. It was what you could call a well-rounded experience. Funnily, looking back, the topic, based on the publication of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, […]

1.0 In 1967 TJ Clark, latterly ensconced in brilliance and tenure at Berkeley, was a PhD student at the Courtauld and a part-time acolyte of Guy Debord. Together with Donald Nicholson-Smith, Charles Radcliffe, and Christopher Gray he wrote ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ in which he avers, bracingly: Most […]