Writer - critic relations

'Whatever a stern criticism may say as to the abiding merit of his work, at least there can be no doubt as to the value…

Recounts Henry Handel Richardson's tussle with reviewers critical of her translations of Norwegian novels Siren Voices and The Fisher Lass.

It's the beginning of winter, 1977. I'm sitting in a freezing room in Brisbane, staring at a typewriter, thinking about revolutions I've just returned from…

John Shaw Neilson once remarked that 'Some people seem to think that it [the lyric] should be as definite as an ironmonger's catalogue, and as…

Examines Baynton’s story ‘The Chosen Vessel’ and its critical reception by Phillips and others with regard to the relationship between narrative and gender. ‘Focusing on…

A review essay of Peter Alexander's biography Les Murray: A Life in Progress with reference to broader considerations of biographical writing and the authorial subject.

While Thomas Keneally himself generously acknowledges that 'the critics made me' (Pierce, Interview), few Australian authors - in the course of long, productive and internationally…

So at fifty years, what can we say? An easy conclusion would be that Keneally is best understood (as he himself has suggested from time…

The making of Thomas Keneally can be conventionally addressed in regard to his Irish Catholic working-class ancestry, his discovery of a vocation that was not…