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Book review — The Anniversary, by Stephanie Bishop

Title: The Anniversary

Author: Stephanie Bishop

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2023; RRP: $32.99

It is well-accepted that writers should make their protagonists suffer, putting obstacles in the path of redemption or whatever it is the story arc demands. Stephanie Bishop, in her fourth novel, The Anniversary, constructs a most arduous life for her main character J.B. Blackwood. There is no sparing of the difficulties, mind, I thought most of Blackwood’s difficulties were her own doing, poor life choices.

Bishop is a highly credentialled writer, and I felt it showed, impressed by the writing and the construction of the characters. I just didn’t warm to the story or the characters. I felt the misfortune contrived and difficult to accept, even if it was necessary to develop the theme.  Despite suggesting contrivance in the plot, it would not surprise me to find it is based on the real experiences of actual people. Truth is stranger than fiction.

A husband lost at sea, falling overboard, I know it does happen. Flying off to glamourous literary awards and being interviewed by the New Yorker magazine, so what? I do read the New Yorker. With some elements of the story, I was reminded of the “airport novels” of Harold Robbins, all that arbitrarily injected glamour. Is that still a thing?

Stephanie Bishop talks desire, creativity and sex scenes.

@ good reading

The circumstances of Blackwood’s life are not that unusual: difficult childhood, mother-rejection complex, difficult relationship with father, married young – to an older man, her idolised lecturer, who represented recognition (for Blackwood), sophistication and possibly authority. Bishop puts Blackwood’s life under the microscope with references and excerpts from her childhood, and the stages of her relationship with her now deceased husband.

I thought Bishop did an interesting job of laying bare the emotional morass of Blackwood’s life. Perhaps too good a job. Bishops teases out the pressures brought about by complex relationships in a creative’s life. I am sure this book will appeal to many, but it didn’t resonate with me.

Reviewed by: Frank Thompson, June 2023

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy provided by the publisher

Book review — The Tangled Lands, by Glenda Larke

Title: The Tangled Lands

Author: Glenda Larke

Publisher: Wizards Tower Press, 2023; RRP: 22 pounds stg

A new Glenda Larke novel is always welcome on the shelf; her The Aware – the first book in the first of her four trilogies to date – remains a firm favourite, and each of her subsequent works has shown similar skill at world building, character development and accomplished storytelling.

Larke was raised in and has returned to Western Australia, via Tunisia and Malaysia, and while she has mined those landscapes for her work, The Tangled Lands offers a more conventional European-style fantasy setting. One of Larke’s world-building strengths is the use of vernacular, drawing on the landscape and culture to add to the verisimilitude of the world’s culture. The occasional use of dialect harking to the real world undercuts this in parts here, but is overshadowed by the charm of sayings such as ‘pox n rot’ and ‘blind as a flea in a rabbit hole’.

Similarly to her first novel, the striking standalone Havenstar (1999), an intriguing magic system helps further differentiate the world, being entwined in both society and plot.

In the Tangled Lands, the magic is wielded by the redweavers of Kanter, considered a threat to Talodiac, who does its best to keep the magic users out. The redweavers are able to traverse distances by way of magical portals and can also use their magic to form compelling illusions. Talodiac’s priests, serving their strange deities, want none of that business interfering in the smooth running of their kingdom, and King Edwild agrees. Especially when the redweavers strike close to home.

The novel is divided into parts, each devoted to largely a single point of view in what is an elegant way to piece together the narrative from different characters’ experiences, whether separate or shared. Having one character scribing his experience in the first person is a nice diversion from the third person elsewhere. Pervaded as it is by the threat of an execution, the section also builds that character and the reader’s empathy for him while slotting neatly into the contest of cloak and dagger.

Glenda Larke on trilogies, landscape and her writing process

with jane routley, 2016

The first part of the novel works as a prologue, setting up the seismic events that follow. Enter Sergeant Hervan of the King’s Guard, serving his liege with rigid loyalty, even as his family is drawn deeper into a world-changing conspiracy. His son, Taygen, possessed of a strong throwing arm and certain lack of caution, becomes a counterpoint as he encounters the wanderers Haze and Innata, each with their own cloaked pasts. He finds himself caught in the classic quandary of fealty versus … let’s call it instinct, for his motivations are unwrapped delightfully upon the page and don’t need labelling here.

As one might expect in a tale of intrigue and royal shenanigans, not all is at it seems, and deception is not confined to the redweavers as the two lands are drawn inexorably together as the plot unwinds. For Taygen and Haze in particular, it is a path  of discovery as they find their place in the world and come to terms with their pasts. As the world and our protagonists reveal their layers of secrets, the story marches to its grand showdown with the fate of two lands in the balance.

It’s likely that some of the big reveals won’t come so much as a surprise but a confirmation of the reader’s suspicions, but The Tangled Land manages to dodge some of the obvious expectations to deliver another fine, entertaining addition to the Larke bibliography.

Reviewed by: Jason Nahrung

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Book review — The Daughters of Madurai, by Rajasree Variyar

Title: The Daughters of Madurai

Author: Rajasree Variyar

Publisher: Hachette, 30 May 2023; RRP: $32.99

Rajasree Variyar was born in Sydney but now lives in London. She has an MA in Creative Writing. The Daughters of Madurai is Rajasree’s debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Hachette UK 2019 Mo Siwecharran prize. She has had other successes with short story writing.

This is a story about a mother and daughter, Janani and Nila. But the novel reveals much more about circumstances and life in Madurai, India. It is told in a way that allows the reader to gain an insight into and hopefully empathy for the cultural and traditional manner of many families, particularly poorer and lower caste people.

Young girls were married off at an early age and traditionally went to live with their husband’s family, where they were often considered to be hired help. The girls’ families paid a dowry to the husbands’ families for the marriage to occur. Hence raising daughters was seen as placing families into extreme poverty when the time came for them to marry – many female babies were ‘dealt with’ at birth, a harsh, cruel, and desperate act. For some groups the act of infanticide was the only way to survive as a family. Sons were seen as wanted for the continuation of families. ‘A girl is a burden; a girl is a curse.’

Janani’s story is set in 1992 when her life is proving to be a tremendous struggle in her arranged marriage in India. Her low-caste mother-in-law is a punitive woman who insists on Janani doing all the household tasks and cooking. Janani’s husband is ineffectual, unhelpful, and defers to his mother. It is difficult to imagine the injustice of the situation. The fear of delivering a baby girl instead of a boy and having no power to act against the consequences of birthing a female child is ever present. The heartbreaking account of Janani’s early married life is at times overwhelming. Janani, however, is determined to overcome.  

Rajasree Variyar talks about The Daughters of Madurai

@ the BN Book Club

Two decades later, in 2019, Nila and her mother and father in Australia decide to travel to India for a visit to her dying grandfather. Curious regarding the family background, Nila knows extraordinarily little about her mother’s side of the family back in India; she is hopeful the trip will fill the gaps. Her parents, particularly her mother, have forever been silent regarding her own family until the secrets begin unravelling during the Madurai visit. But Nila has her own secret – a secret that she is fearful of telling her parents.  

The story of Janani and Nila and their family is narrated with vivid and detailed descriptions of Madurai, village life and events from the past. It is harsh but hopeful; there is sadness and disbelief that lingers throughout this story, but the characters are enormously resilient and engaging.

Rajasree Variyar has produced a story that informs, entertains, and deals with the difficult topic of gender in Indian society.  Written with a gentle but powerful hand, The Daughters of Madurai doesn’t disappoint.

Reviewed by: Heather Whitford Roche

Ballarat Writers Book Review Group, May 2023

Review copy provided by the publisher

Book review — Political Lives, by Chris Wallace

Title: Political Lives

Author: Chris Wallace

Publisher: UNSW Press, February 2023; RRP $39.99

When in Castlemaine (Vic) who can resist a visit to Stonemans Bookroom, a truly independent bookseller, in the main shopping precinct. With pleasant memories of previous visits lingering in the back of my mind, I browsed the shelves and tables, enjoying the unsullied newness of the various offerings.

I would not normally look twice at books on politics and politicians, but my interest was piqued by the author’s name, Chris Wallace, and, of course, the casually intimate cover photo of Bob and Blanche. The latter with cup and saucer in hand, so Australian, a good cuppa in moments of intrigue.

Chris Wallace is a name familiar to me, mostly by reputation. Not because of her appearances on the ABC’s Drum program or her a repute as a savvy political commentator, and certainly not because of her role as a professor at the Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra. She frequented a mutually favourite cafe in Manuka. It was a popular Friday afternoon haunt, not just for political journos but also with us lesser mortals; Grande’s served good pasta and was BYO.

Political Lives has all the trappings of a serious work, well referenced, cross referenced, indexed and clearly the product of careful research and extensive subject matter knowledge. Perhaps appealing to a niche audience, being a book about books, it is above all a good read.

The main academic thread of Political Lives is the evolution and role of the political biography in Australia — federal Australia, not the states and their upstart premiers.  Indeed, I don’t recall even a remote consideration that premiers might even warrant a biography. 

Listen to Chris Wallace in conversation about Political Lives

@ experience ANU

Wallace begins Political Lives with an explanation of her own aborted biography of Julia Gillard. She did not want to fuel the inappropriate behaviour rampant at the time. Then, she chronologically works her way through the biographies of prime ministers.

Political Lives is very much a story behind the story, providing insights into how the various biographies came about, who wrote them, why they wrote them, lifting the lid on a specialised segment of the literary world. A world mostly inhabited by journalists and academics. Wallace laces the story with serious discussion on the role of the contemporary biography in the political process, arguing their value for party colleagues and the public to be able to examine leaders and potential leaders through the eyes of professional writers/academics/journalists.

The attitude to political biographies by the various former prime ministers is interesting, and like so much of politics shows consistency with the views of the occupants of the political landscape.  Wallace does a respectable job of being even handed in her approach, limited, I would assume, by the availability of material and circumstances surrounding the various published biographies. Regardless of a biographer’s political alignment, Wallace is very much in favour of biographers taking an honest, warts-and-all approach.

I found this book interesting, engaging, and easy to read.  In these days of hyped social media, fake news and highly packaged political messaging by manipulative politicians, this was a refreshing and sensible read.

Reviewed by: Frank Thompson

Ballarat Writers Inc Book Review Group

Book review — The Bellbird River Country Choir, by Sophie Green

Title: The Bellbird River Country Choir

Author: Sophie Green

Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2022; RRP $32.99

Australian author Sophie Green’s The Bellbird River Country Choir follows a successful track record.  Her 2018 debut novel The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club was long listed for the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year and the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction. It, along with The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle and Thursdays at Orange Blossom House, were Top 10 bestsellers.  

This is a book about relationships between men and women, about women alone and in their friendships with other women, and between family members held loosely together within their shared experiences as members of a small-town community choir, and the town community itself.

As can be seen in the titles of her other bestsellers, there is a formulaic base to her works, but I say this without judgement.  I, like countless others, value the security of a familiar narrative formula that we already know is going to work for us. Her presence in Top 10 bestseller lists also signifies more than just commercial success. I chose to read this book because I like small-town stories and anything with a choir in it but also because I was in the mood for an easy-reading escape.

From the beginning that is exactly what The Bellbird River Country Choir offers, but as the story unfolded this changed — what it lacked in depth was made up by the range of relationship and personal issues it covered. It does not pretend to be an in-depth exploration, but the events and the feelings, thoughts and reactions of the characters concerned are familiar or easy to identify with. Most importantly, they become characters easy to care about, a vital ingredient in any reading experience.

The choir is the focal place where the main characters mingle and bounce off each other. The other setting is the town itself and the dry, brown country surrounding it. The town itself and surroundings are experienced and explored through the different characters who inhabit it, both longtime and new.

Sophie Green on her books and writing practice

tell me what to read @ youtube

The story begins through the eyes of single mother Alex who has moved out of the city, motivated by a need to live more cheaply and be able to spend more time with her daughter.

Some of the issues the choir members experience include the battle between Alex and her daughter, who desperately wants to return to Sydney to live instead with the beloved grandmother Alex is in continual conflict with; a mother riddled with guilt, released from a jail sentence she knows she deserved, fighting to reconnect with the children she knows she betrayed, and fearful of the townspeople finding out; a close brother-and-sister relationship fragmented by the brother’s schizophrenia after a seemingly normal childhood, his parents unable to cope and the daughter who tries to protect him; a closet artist; a compassionate stepmother unable to bear her own children responsible for those of another; a strong and dignified older woman forced to deal with her husband’s desertion for someone younger; a famous soprano unable to accept her diminished vocal range after a throat operation; a child bullied endlessly at school and her mother’s struggles to help her.  

This tapestry of personal and relationship issues is not unfamiliar. Many can be found behind the closed doors of ordinary homes and streets around us. A success of the work is that they are woven together seamlessly, creating an image of a community of individuals that covers a lot of ground without collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.

In each case the situations the choir members are dealing with are also set within the context of the society in which they play out, and include the thinking and self-exploration by the individuals suffering each trauma, from the irritating or temporary to the toxic. The bullied child exists in the story within the context of the school and the town and the psychology of the school playground — bullying that many parents will identify with. The female victim of a bullying lover looks deep within herself, extricating her own fear, loneliness and a desperate need for affection from the ugliness of the man who abuses her. The soprano is suffering what many older retired Australians experience when their working lives retreat.

It is not a poetic work using clever literary devices, nor does it offer anything new to the genre, but nevertheless I was totally engaged as the story slowly unfolded deeper into the lives of the different choir members and the life of the town. It strength is the skill with which the narrative is constructed: how it all hangs together and its humanity. There are also places where the author captured sensitive and delicate states of being, pinpointing subtle emotional responses.

When the distraught soprano rings an old friend complaining about the choir, we read,

‘Dear me,’ purrs Ivan comfortingly. Which is the reason she rang him: he’s good at being reassuring.

Or another leaving her lover,

Checking twice over her shoulder to see if he’s followed her, because for some reason she feels like prey.

It is still what would be described as light reading but sometimes the simplest of narratives travel a long way. There are one or two undeniably corny bits, but they fit in the end because life is sometimes corny too.

Very satisfying for when you are in the mood for an easy, reliably feel-good read that does not demand much thinking but which carries you away, believably, from your external world with its demands and into another place. With its distinctly Australian setting – located in a tiny fictional town a short distance from Tamworth — it will also appeal especially to small-town Australian readers.

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

Why I like writing about books

I became addicted to books before I could even read, and I love to share that addiction by talking or writing about them. The act of picking up a book and disappearing into the story is a daily component of my life, silently dictating choices I have made from childhood til today.

I grow every time I read a book, even those judged as badly written. I am always drawn deeply inside the covers, physically, emotionally and psychologically. The world around me disappears and I emerge after the final page a slightly different person. I experience books as if I am sitting beside a stranger having coffee somewhere, and they are sharing something they have discovered, or a dream had.  I experience reading as being on another plane from where I am physically located in the world.

This alone however is not a reason to love writing about books. It is just where that story started.

Apart from that unjudging reading of books back-to-back since primary school days my academic credentials are a degree in English Literature, followed by Postgraduate Diplomas in Librarianship and years later in Professional Writing. Each decision was made independently of the one preceding yet, in retrospect, were a pathway guiding and shaping the undisciplined reader in me.

I had mixed feelings about my English Literature degree. On the plus side, I had access to fabulous reading lists, and a wonderful library. The tutorials and lectures introduced me to others, lecturers, tutors and fellow students, who shared my addiction to literature. 

I learnt terms and concepts that perfectly encapsulated things I ‘knew’ already but had not had words for; I love for example the concept of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (believing in dragons) as much as ‘enjambment’, an acceptable literary strategy to carry an incomplete line of poetry into the next to maintain a rhyming pattern or show a pause.

However I had a problem with the Leavesite method of literary criticism beloved by the Department, requiring a detailed dissection of text and an analytic approach that was purely objective. That didn’t seem to recognize the unique contribution of the author, body and soul. I toed the line but felt conscious of that silenced voice behind the words I dissected.

It also left out the reader who would bring their own interpretations – naturally enough, as an academic approach requires leaving out any response even remotely subjective to a work. That’s a defining factor of academic work and must be respected as such, however it always felt like my thinking was being boxed into a place; my own thoughts about what and how I read did not fit.

I am always aware of the disembodied author behind the text, their words, ‘speak’ to me, factual or fictional. During my degree I read from the recommended critique lists but also studied works that were biographical: grass roots material like letters, diaries, essays and portraits so I could see their faces and how they lived.

In my final year special project, I chose for my theme how Thomas Hardy’s depiction of landscape changed over Tess of the d’Urbevilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure. Feeling a bit nervous about what the reaction would be I sought out his personal writings to find the man himself, sourcing material in a diary and collections of letters where he wrote about his aims and approaches as he worked on all his books.

I used other works of literary analysis and examined Hardy’s stated intentions in his letters and how they appeared in each novel. I also quoted Hardy’s voice from the letters whenever I found a clearly expressed correlation between what he was aiming at and how it was expressed in different degrees of richness and complexity in each of the three works. 

I presented the completed work to my tutorial group and tutor, defending my approach. The outcome was overwhelmingly positive; my tutor thought it was publishable, and offered me an invitation into the Honours stream.

This acceptance of my choosing to put the author first as a valid strategy in literary analysis gave me confidence in my own thoughts.

On completing my degree, free to read whatever I liked, I discovered I could no longer read my beloved sci-fi without Leavis dragging me back to reality. Dystopian societies, complex alien societies, robots and cyborgs, something knocking on the outside of spaceships light years from earth – all suddenly appeared two-dimensional. Thankfully nonstop reading science fiction for two years fixed that.

I didn’t lose all I had learnt during my degree, especially retaining the ability to enjoy beautifully constructed sentences and see the scaffolding beneath and ways of writing that I would have missed otherwise – from the ‘no grammar’ of e e cummings to William Faulkner’s unsettling prose and the density of Herbert Melville’s Moby Dick. I battled through many of them; reading Moby Dick was rereading dense sentences over and over for pages then turning a page and suddenly getting it, surrounded by sea gulls and cold salt air and a leviathan of heart-stopping immensity. This made me think more about how I am affected by what I read, how other readers might respond to different writing styles, and how writers accomplish what they do.

 Studying a post-graduate diploma in Librarianship gave me an insider view of that most democratic and generous of human institutions, the public library system.  I learned the most important thing was how to give readers what they want, and not what I thought they should want. I learnt this in the interview for my first library job with a special library for the blind and print handicapped where I was told my studying classics worked against me as my degree branded me as someone whose knowledge of books was limited and unsuitable; I told them about my science fiction addiction and that got me the job!

Degree and day job sorted, I fitted my love of reading and writing in between work, raising children, and earning enough to keep body and soul together. Familiar with the value of a disciplined approach, and still writing, I enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Professional Writing at Canberra University. Like the English degree, I gained fresh insights but stayed true to writer me; what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, did not get lost in what I learned there.

All this feeds how I write about books. I think about the authors themselves, where they come from and who they are. I listen to their voice. I think about what sorts of readers choose what sorts of books, and also what publishers add to get writers’ words to those readers. I work on identifying my subjective versus objective responses to a book, including to works shared by fellow writers in my local writing group. And I try to make my words sing.


by Rhonda Cotsell

Book review — The Gold Leaf Executions, by Helen Marshall

Author: Helen Marshall

Title: The Gold Leaf Executions

Publisher: Unsung Stories, March 2023; RRP: 35 GBP

Helen Marshall comes to be an Australian resident from her native Canada via Oxford, academia laying the trail that has most recently landed her at the University of Queensland where she is a senior lecturer in creative writing. That strong research background, with a particular interest in the medieval, has found its way into her work, as inspiration as well as moments of verisimilitude. And, of course, the doctor can write. Oh, yes.

The Gold Leaf Executions is her third short story collection, adding to two poetry chapbooks and her novel, The Migration (2019). Marshall is an accomplished practitioner of speculative fiction – her bibliography teems with science fiction and fantasy publishers, and her second collection, 2014’s Gifts for the One Who Comes After, won a World Fantasy Award (adding to her Best Newcomer award of 2013) and the Shirley Jackson Award – and her prose has the elegance and voice to entice the big-L literary fan who enjoys the spice of fabulism or magical realism.

Regardless of one’s genre preferences, Marshall’s ability to paint a picture is unarguable:

‘Lydia’s feet had all the grace of birds with broken wings’, she writes in ‘All Things Fall and Are Built Again’.

Or how about this, in ‘Caldera’, where a young woman is finding herself in a folklore-infused Reykjavik:

‘She spent her days by the old harbour watching terns circle and dive, bodies perfectly engineered for flight. She admired their effortless movements, their murderous instincts. The sky was grey. The sea was grey. The world reflected itself, and the birds stitched the two gleaming surfaces together, rising, falling, rising, falling.’

The Gold Leaf Executions compiles a selection of works published between 2014 and 2019, predominantly in spec fic genre publications and anthologies, with ‘Katalog’ unique to the collection. It is an exemplar of the collection’s trend to overtly relate a story, or a part of a story, in this case through the words of the son of an artist testifying to a committee in a harsh, embattled Communist Bulgaria about his father’s – and mother’s – powers.  

Death, as the publisher’s blurb illuminates and the title suggests, is a strong theme in the collection, presented in settings from the everyday to the fractured real to the fantastical. These are also stories of transition or transformation, not just of loss but self-discovery, the fabulous elements serving as the crack in the world that allows Marshall to shine her light on the characters, and not always in the way we might expect.

In ‘The Embalmer’, for example, she purposefully, explicitly, breaks into the narrative to tell us this story is not going where we think it might, especially those used to wading in the dark side of fiction. No, this is how it plays out in the real world of this story, of course it does. While Stephen King is a clear template for her writer Barron St John in ‘Survival Strategies’, ‘The Embalmer’ is not a King story. It’s clearly a Marshall, overtly subverting genre expectation; something she does notably again when she breaks the fictive wall in ‘Survival Strategies’ by namechecking this collection.

This subversion, though, and the clear omniscient narration mentioned above that frames many of the stories, may mean that, for all the beauty and sheer clever writing presented here, mileage will likely vary. The omniscience, perhaps combined with a feeling that some of the protagonists are lacking agency (not necessarily without reason), breeds a certain remove between story and reader. Consequently, narrative drive can be lacking. The voice is strong – the difference in narration between the Cthulhu nods of ‘Caro in Carno’ and ‘Exposure’ to the second person of ‘One-quarter Dreaming, Three-quarters Want’ and the contemporary third-person of US twins dealing with death in ‘Heaven’s Night-blooming Gardens’ is clear – but that distance between reader and protagonist may limit investment.

Regardless, there is plenty to reward here, and it is gratifying to have these stories mustered conveniently in the one volume. I look forward to seeing if her sojourn down under will influence her new works, for surely we can claim this talent as ‘ours’, just as we have embraced her equally masterful and fellow expat Lisa L Hannett.

The sad part for readers outside the UK will be the postage, as The Gold Leaf Executions is available at the moment solely as a limited edition hardback through the publisher’s website (http://www.unsungstories.co.uk/the-gold-leaf-executions-by-helen-marshall). Watch that space.

Reviewed by: Jason Nahrung

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

The 2023 Pamela Miller Prize

It’s that time of the year again with the Pamela Miller Prize, our annual flash fiction competition.

The winner of the Pamela Miller Prize will receive a certificate and $100 first prize, as well as publication in the Ballarat Writers newsletter and website. The winner will be announced at the Ballarat Writers July members’ night. 

The Pamela Miller Prize first ran in 2015, in memory of Pamela Miller, who was a very active and productive member of Ballarat Writers. She was a writer of short stories and poetry, and won the short story competition with ‘Murder at MADE’ in 2014. Early in 2015, Pamela wrote a very popular poem called ‘Bronze Heads—The Prime Minister’s Walk’ as part of a Ballarat Writers project during the Begonia Festival.

Entries open: Monday 1 May

Entries close: Wednesday 31 May

Ballarat Writers is accepting fictional prose entries of up to 450 words on the theme Smile. Entry is free. 

This is limited to members of Ballarat Writers, so make sure you’ve joined or renewed your membership!

All entries must:

  • be original and unpublished
  • be written by a current member of Ballarat Writers (judging committee members cannot enter)
  • engage with the theme Smile, and be 450 words in length or less (not including the title)
  • be sent to competitions@ballaratwriters.com with the subject line ‘2023 Pamela Miller Prize Entry’.

As the competition will be a blind judging, please do not include your name or contact details on the entry. 

You can read more about the Pamela Miller prize here.

Good luck and happy writing!

Book review — Shirley Hazzard: a Writing Life, by Brigitta Olubas

Title: Shirley Hazzard: a Writing Life

Author: Brigitta Olubas

Publisher: Hachette/Virago Press, 2022; RRP $34.99

Shirley Hazzard was an important Australian author, born in 1931 and dying in 2016. Though born in Australia, she left in 1947, travelling through Europe with her family. She finished up in New York where she worked with the United Nations through the 1950s and where she spent the rest of her life. 

Her 2003 novel, The Great Fire, won the US National Book Award, the Miles Franklin award and the William Dean Howells medal, and was named Book of the Year by The Economist. Her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, was shortlisted for the 2010 Lost Man Booker Prize; her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, an international bestseller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award; her novel A Long Story Short won the 1977 O Henry award. and she was shortlisted for numerous other awards. She also wrote non-fiction.

Whenever people speak of her writing. constant reference is made to the particular beauty of her writing, in words like ‘luminous’ and ‘brilliant’, but also wisdom and insight.  From The Transit of Venus we read,

            “When you realise someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less.

            “Unless you love them.”

or my favourite,

            “Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”

This is an authorised biography written by Brigitta Olubras, a University of New South Wales  English professor whose areas of research includes Australian literature and transnational writing, literary and visual culture, gender studies and narrative ethics. The academic qualifications of the author are reflected in this densely researched work and its layout.

Read an obituary of Shirley Hazzard by James Campbell

@ the guardian

It is difficult to do justice to this very extensive biography of Shirley Hazzard without reference to its sheer volume. It is so comprehensive that it could be described as being at the intersection where biography meets reference work, almost a mini encyclopedia.

Because of this, the work is not just a little daunting, but a huge plus is that its layout is well set out, detailed, thorough, and easy to navigate. It is laid out such that particular areas of interest can be easily located without having to plough through the whole book.

Under Sources we are given a guide to using both Sources and Notes. Both provide guidance for future researchers or those just interested in looking deeper into her subject’s life find more material. Of particular value is a reference to the existence of as yet unorganised material, which is almost all Hazzard’s diaries and notebooks, suggesting the story of her life is not finished. Instead of a bibliography by title as is usual, there is a list of abbreviations for each source used in the copious Notes following. 

This takes the reader to the source, and this, if followed up, is a chance to check the context of quotes and also the location of the item quoted from. The Index is a richly detailed gateway to very specific areas. I found the bits referring to Hazzard’s relationship with her sister interesting. for example, but being scattered throughout made it difficult to get the full picture as they were mainly snippets of information, many pages apart. However, by working my way through the pages listed in the Index under her sisters name, I was able to get a clearer picture. In contrast, the Contents page is a simple chronological list, meaning interest in a particular time frame is very easy to find. My only criticism of this area would be that the text is smaller than the rest of the book and some may find this difficult.

Watch a talk by the author about A Writing Life

the center for fiction @ youtube

The author has used as her source a wide range of published and unpublished material, so unlike a reference tool it is rich with personal detail and pages of photographs, and crosses the boundary between her subject’s personal and family life, and her writing aims and output rather than just being a collection of facts.

Anyone interested in Australian literature generally and Shirley Hazzard particularly would find this very useful to absorb slowly in its entirety or dip in and out of. Those who enjoy biographies would enjoy it as the mix of Hazzard’s personal and professional life makes her come alive on the pages.

Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell

Ballarat Writers Inc. Book Review Group

Review copy supplied by the publisher

Book review — If I Were You, by Peter Quarry

Title: If I Were You: A psychologist puts himself on the couch

Author: Peter Quarry

Publisher: Hardie Grant Books, February 2022; RRP: $35.00

As a fundamentally nosy person, I enjoy a good memoir. I like hearing about a person’s life, I like being included in secrets previously unsaid and I like the reflection that recounting the past often prompts. Peter Quarry’s If I Were You: A psychologist puts himself on the couch well and truly delivers this voyeuristic pleasure, but it takes it further. Quarry isn’t just interested in what his life means to himself, he’s interested in what it means for you.

If I Were You has an unusual format: throughout the book, Quarry writes letters about his life as “Pete” to his psychologist persona, “PQ”, and then responds to them. Going in, I wasn’t sure how well this would work as a mechanism. Would it feel contrived? Would PQ’s letters feel like they were tailored to prompt exactly the responses that Quarry wanted to write about as Pete? Would the psychoanalysis PQ offered on those responses really achieve anything other than to say “I agree”?

It turns out that Quarry is a complex person, full of contradictions. He is wild and hedonistic, while also being industrious and showing a deep need for security. Once I finished reading the book, I could no longer be surprised by how well the format worked.

Because it does work well. It works superbly. Pete is almost always willing to follow the path that PQ guides him on, but not always. I found myself taking notes—“Laura, this is how you tell a therapist that you’d rather explore something else”—because it was genuinely easy to get lost in the narrative that said these were two distinct characters. When Pete says that something PQ said resonates with him, I don’t hear a person patting himself on the back for crafting an insightful sentence, I hear a man genuinely struck by a perspective he hadn’t considered. By putting himself on the couch, Quarry gains a distance from his life that allows new ideas to surface.

Quarry isn’t just here for the catharsis, though. His main motivation with this book is to inspire reflection in others. Through the mechanism of PQ, he is able to outline exactly how anyone could go about examining their own life as he has done, and I have to say it was very effective for me. Though on the surface Quarry and I have very little in common, I noted several times how much I related to what he was saying and daydreamed about what my session with a PQ would uncover.

Quarry writes very early on that he’s not interested in the recounting of a life that doesn’t delve deeper. He doesn’t want “mere description”, he wants “examination”. This is both addressed to himself, as a way to cement a purpose that would remain in sight for the entire book, and also to anyone who would like to follow his example. It’s like he’s saying, “Here. Take these questions and do it yourself. But think when you do!”

When reviewing a book, I think the most important question is not “was this good?” (and it was), but “did this do what it set out to do?”. Quarry makes this easy to figure out by stating his objectives clearly in his introduction. He wants to explore his life, inspire similar explorations in his readers and trigger empathy, admiration and shock at his exploits.

I greatly enjoyed reading If I Were You. It felt honest and I did indeed empathise with and admire Pete (and PQ for that matter). More than that, I closed the book raring to put my own life under the microscope.

Ballarat Writers Incorporated is delighted to announce that Peter Quarry, author of If I Were You: A psychologist puts himself on the couch, will be coming to Ballarat in April 2023 to deliver a workshop, based on his book, on how to write a memoir that goes deeper than a recounting of events.

Reviewed by: Laura Wilson

Review copy provided by the publisher

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