So you’re starting up a radical cultural space called Under The Hammer. The name comes from a quote from Mayakovsky (sometimes also attributed to Brecht), which reads, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Can you briefly describe the aim of the space?

Sometimes I get so tired of words. They pour out of me. It is not words that I lack. It is the discipline to arrange the words in a way that best articulates what it is I am trying to say. I’m trying to tear down walls, layers and layers of walls.

This is an open invitation to the launch of Overland 204, at the Melbourne Writers Festival at 2.30 pm on Saturday 27 August. Overland 204 is a special, extended edition. It contains Malalai Joya’s thoughts on why Australia must get out of Afghanistan, and John Martinkus’ account of being kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq and […]

Where does a writer begin writing their novel? Is the first sentence they put on the page the first sentence the reader will read? Where do novels come from? And what does first inspiration look like? In Westgarth Books first emerging writers’ event, Steven Amsterdam, Chris Womersley, Matt Hooper and Maryrose Cuskelly will join Sydney […]

With the closing ceremony of the Overload poetry festival at the Grace Darling Hotel on Sunday, I was disappointed poetry would once again retreat from the limelight. The experience I had this year, participating in the festival as a poet, was far more exciting than my role reviewing it here on Overland last year. Observing […]

Today, I’ve been putting away a full run of old Overlands. As we move to the launch of edition 200, it seemed like an idea to put up a few of the past covers that caught my eye. So here’s  a bunch of them, selected on no basis other than I thought that they looked […]

From the doubts of conception through to the power of labour, and onto the magic and miseries of babies and children and mature awareness as daughters – 5 women wordsmiths share their perspectives to create a multi-voiced portrait of mothering in modern Australia. Performing on the night: Koraly Dimitriadis, Vicki Thornton, Amy Bodossian, Tiggy Johnson […]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fiction writer in possession of a good tale must be in want of an audience. In the absence of a publishing contract or an appreciative family member/housemate, such an audience can be difficult to reach. Equally so, if Sydney’s lovers of literature fancy a night out to […]

Last weekend Canberra was pumping with ideas. Borrowing from K Rudd, this year the annual Manning Clark House Weekend of Ideas was titled ‘Fair Suck of the Sauce Bottle: A Celebration of Australian Language’. The sauce bottle didn’t feature much, but the evolution and current usage of language was discussed, dissected and debated. Barrister and […]