Fiona Murphy

“Fuck rules,” writes Ben Shewry in Uses for Obsession: A (Chef’s) Memoir. As the owner of Attica, one of Australia’s most awarded fine dining restaurants, Shewry is driven to take creative risks. From building a cold smoker out of an …

An exhibition at the State Library of Queensland about the Deaf Indigenous Dance Group has the power to radically reorientate public perceptions of communication.

Martyna Majok’s groundbreaking play Cost of Living exploits the deliciously dark edge of disability humour, giving its characters complexity, while skewering assumptions.

In some places in the ocean, fish chorus “like a forest at dawn or dusk”, writes Canadian science writer Amorina Kingdon in Sing Like Fish: How sound rules life under water. It is a bewitching fact, ethereal and strange. It becomes wilder …

“The thing is that many men are bad and even when they’re not bad they’re not that good either,” says the matriarch Queenie in Jenny Ackland’s new novel, Hurdy Gurdy. “They should be better but no one can force them so they do what …

How do you write a memoir when your memories have been taken? This question is the driving force in poet Anna Jacobson’s memoir, How to Knit a Human. In 2011, at the age of 23, Jacobson awakens in a “white room” and “feels as though …

Halfway through the essay collection The Pulling, Sydney-based author Adele Dumont tells the reader: “There is one thing more I have kept from you … truth be told I have come to despise the word, so ugly, so clinical: trichotillomania.” The …

“Grief is very tiring,” says Dinah in Bird Life, the second novel by New Zealand poet and author Anna Smaill. Her debut, The Chimes, won the World Fantasy Award and was longlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. Elements of speculative …

On their latest album, The Night Terrors return to electronic music with a focus on the beguiling possibilities of the theremin.

Sydney Theatre Company’s adaptation of Pip Williams’ best-selling novel The Dictionary of Lost Words is loyal to the book but weighed down by exposition.

Jo Ann Beard has a loose grip on genre. She describes her stories as essays and her essays as stories. This isn’t feckless rule-breaking: it’s art. In 2022, Beard received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is one of …

Sleep is not a trifling topic. “How one sleeps is a very intimate subject. It evokes the bed, family, peace. And the couple, sex.” French author Marie Darrieussecq has barely slept in more than 20 years. She is not alone in this state of interminable …

Belvoir St Theatre’s adaptation of Charlotte Wood’s novel The Weekend is a thrilling representation of the heartbreaking mess of living.

In her latest book, distinguished American science writer Jennifer Ackerman returns to the subject matter that made her a bestseller: birds. What an Owl Knows: the new science of the world’s most enigmatic birds is an immersive and immensely …

In Claire Fuller’s fifth novel, The Memory of Animals, the dropsy virus is sweeping the world “causing disorientation, memory loss, seizures and coma”. Neffy is one of 16 volunteers participating in a research trial. She has agreed to being …

It is 1951 and, in the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, summer is approaching. Pont-Saint-Esprit has a bakery where the baker’s wife, Elodie, stands behind the counter feeling “so very bored”; a bar where the townsmen meet night after night …

The genre-bending compositions of ARIA-nominated musician Nat Bartsch have an astonishing ability to construct feeling.

The National Theatre’s All of Us is a powerful indictment of austerity but also shows the possibilities of inclusion.

Peter Knight’s first solo album in a decade, Shadow Phase, invites the listener into a world of possibility.

The pandemic has seen an increase in people reporting tinnitus. Although the cause is not known, it could be related to the stress and anxiety of Covid-19.

In the course of the pandemic, sign language has adapted and changed to deal with the demands of televised press conferences. Importantly, the interpreters are increasingly Deaf themselves.