Maria Takolander

On the acknowledgements page at the end of Letters to Our Robot Son, author Cadance Bell reveals she signed with her publisher, Ultimo Press, because it called her manuscript “Science Fiction and meant it”. In describing this debut novel …

Florence Nightingale, who founded modern nursing on the battlefields of the Crimean War, was a legend in her own lifetime – and also in mine. Growing up, any girl with pretensions to self-sacrifice was compared – sceptically, sarcastically – to …

Classics of Western literature have imagined the condition of the expatriate as fugitive, out of place at home and abroad, uninterested in the past or the future, adrift in a way that makes him – for the protagonist is generally male – a prime vehicle …

Death, according to the poet and critic William Empson, is “the trigger of the literary man’s biggest gun”. In fact, death is central to the arts and culture generally, as a space in which we grapple with the meaning of our lives, a problem that …

If you’ve heard of Portia Geach – and that’s a big “if” – it might be in relation to the Portia Geach Memorial Award, a prize for portraiture by women artists that was first awarded in 1965. The accolade was established not only to honour …

The vampire story, like the vampire itself, has proved hard to kill. More than a century after Dracula’s publication, we had the noughties contagion of The Twilight Saga, but there have also been less regrettable outbreaks. In the …

Legend has it that a female pope, disguised as a man, ruled the Vatican during the Middle Ages. While modern historians have discredited the story – based largely on the fact the Vatican’s enemies never weaponised what would have been a monumental …

Feminism and fantasy have a winning history, as demonstrated by Angela Carter’s celebrated collection of revisionary fairytales, The Bloody Chamber (1979), or the ground-breaking television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). …

Sophie Matthiesson’s debut novel, Together We Fall Apart, is another contribution to the genre of feminine middle-class melodrama in Australian fiction, the growing appetite for which might be bound up with the rise of book groups. This type …

Science fiction is often concerned with reproduction, which is typically figured as an incursion of the alien upon the human – exemplified by the horrific inseminations and chest-cracking faux-births in that classic of science-fiction cinema, Alien …

Drawing a distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction has come to seem like a reactionary gesture. Likewise, classifying a novel as romance can no longer be regarded as a pejorative act. However, when it comes to Melissa Goode’s debut novel, …

Nova Weetman’s Love, Death & Other Scenes is an elegiac memoir, a subgenre of memoir that gives ballast to stories of everyday lives by focusing on life’s ultimate drama: death. Of course, the everyday and mortality are intimate companions. …

A singularity is a concept in physics denoting a location where gravitational forces are so strong they cause a collapse in space and time. The best-known example is a black hole, a point of infinite gravity from which not even light can escape, rendering …

In the age of Tinder and speed dating, swiping left and ghosting, what obligations do we have to those we date – or court, as it was once perhaps more ominously called? This is the question that underlies Courting: An intimate history of love and …

Suzie Miller is a multi-award-winning playwright, whose one-woman play Prima Facie – after earning plaudits for Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company – was staged in the West End, starring Jodie Comer, and won a Best New Play Olivier Award. …

Nadine J. Cohen’s debut novel, Everyone and Everything, brings together the drama of a young woman’s breakdown with comedy reminiscent of Woody Allen or Nora Ephron. Anxiety, for instance, “arrived without warning and then wouldn’t leave. …

Dementia has been in the spotlight in recent times, largely because an ageing population has made the disease unignorable. Indeed, we have seen the labelling of a new generation – the “sandwich generation” – to recognise a cohort of middle-aged …

Australia’s “zero tolerance” policy towards asylum seekers arriving by boat has a dreadful legacy. It affected refugees around the world, as global leaders found inspiration in what former United States president Donald Trump hailed as a “good …

Viola Di Grado is an Italian literary wunderkind. Her first novel won the Premio Campiello Opera Prima when she was 23, making her the youngest winner in the prize’s history. Blue Hunger is Di Grado’s fifth novel, and she’s only 35. The …

Janet Malcolm is renowned for her artful explorations of the artifice of life writing. Her most famous book, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), is as much an analysis of other biographies of Plath and Hughes as it is an examination …

Philip Salom’s latest novel, Sweeney and the Bicycles, is about a man who collects bicycles. This is not, however, a novel about a Lycra-clad, hyper-masculine cycling devotee. Sweeney is a “bicycle romantic”. He prefers brightly coloured …

The figure of the criminal holds a special place in the Australian imagination, which is, after all, that of a convict nation. Ned Kelly’s life and crimes have inspired many of our artists, filmmakers and novelists, and contemporary criminal figures …

Sunbathing might sound like a relaxing holiday read but it is in fact an absorbing study of the grief of a nameless young woman who has lost her father to suicide. Isobel Beech makes apparent how complex grief can be in these circumstances and …

It is New Zealand in the 1950s. A child is born to an unmarried woman with addiction problems, who soon afterwards disappears. The child she leaves behind is a fish, its “gills vulgarly present”, its stink attracting gulls. The child is named after …