The lineup of participating authors for the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature (April 27 - May 3, 2009) to be held in New York, has been announced. Main Australian interest centres on Shaun Tan and Nam Le. The second of these has his nationality listed as "Vietnam/U.K.", yet his associated biography says: "Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia." Neither the UK, nor any of its constituent countries, is mentioned anywhere in his biographical entry. The Ruddster might be Barak Obama's new BFF, but it seems that Australia is still too far away to be comprehensible.
Last year James Bradley was interviewed by an Italian research student who was writing her thesis on the topic "The Photographic Act in Contemporary Australian Fiction". That paper has now been completed, but James decided it wouldn't be available in English for a while, if ever, and so has published some extracts.
A new Australian literary prize has been announced. The John Button prize has been named in honour of the late Senator and Industry Minister and "awards $20,000 to the best piece of non-fiction writing on politics or public policy in the previous 12 months." The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is patron of the prize and the judging panel consists of: Bob Carr, Kerry O'Brien, Morag Fraser (Chair), Judith Brett, and J.M. Coetzee.
Angela Meyer, of the "LiteraryMinded" weblog, has been working on a novel manuscript for the past couple of years and it seems to be coming together at last. She writes about the manuscript's history and the major changes she's made to it just recently. The idea of physically cutting the manuscript up into scenes and laying them out on the floor in various combinations and sortings to check the balance is a good one. People will now tell me this techniques has
been around since Adam was a lad.
Jonathan Crossfield runs the "Copy Write" weblog and has compiled a list of the top 50 writing blogs in Australia. These are weblogs which deal with the actual act of writing rather than just reporting on publishing and books. Lots of interesting new blogs to check out here.
Thorn Birds as a musical? Seems so. Not sure why Colleen McCullough thought that Rachel Ward couldn't act. Ward certainly can now.
