Carmel Bird

“When I began to write seriously, I chose biography as the form that interested me most,” writes Brenda Niall in her introduction to her 2015 biography Mannix. Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman Who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock is …

The first sentence in this powerful collection of short stories ends with the words “uneasy, restless” – a signature of what is to come. John Kinsella is a poet at the top of his game. His fiction reveals a further flowering of his imagination, …

“My breed is extinct now and in any case this tale is coming to you from the cloud of history. I don’t speak up often. But there has been so much talk across the centuries about whether the Duchess was poisoned that I have decided to set the record …”

Among the literary honours awarded to Gregory Day is the 2021 prize from The Nature Conservancy Australia. A profound commitment to the future of the planet as well as a passion for all forms of music and language and a keen awareness of the truths of …

Salonika Burning, the ninth novel from Gail Jones, is an enthralling narrative that transports readers to the battlefields of Greece in 1917. Jones, whose book The Death of Noah Glass won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction …

Angry and enthralling, this novel challenges the reader’s understanding of what a novel might be. In the early years of this century, Sophie Cunningham began working on a fictional account of the life of Leonard Woolf. However, the narrative – as …

“Emma was a young ballerina at the Paris Opera. She was ethereal, intangible, diaphanous – as beautiful as a falling snowflake. She would bound and leap as if fashioned from the air itself, skimming over surfaces like a feather on the breeze. She …”

“I have recently taken it upon myself to work my way through the internet in search of my ancestry. I call it my 1080 Project. As a wise old tech-savvy male elder of the family Rattus rattus, and with no chance of a pleasant natural death, I’m …”

Almost the first thing you find in Mothertongues is a QR code to the soundtrack that singer–songwriter Keppie Coutts created to be part of the reading experience. This work, co-written by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell, is in a category all …