Ranulfo

Young adult fiction

Ranulfo is an exhilarating author for younger readers. His dark and funny novel Nirvana’s Children was published in 2001 by UQP. His second work, a wonderfully subversive novel Danika in the Underworld was published by Pan Macmillan, followed by Danika versus the Monster-Slayer. Nirvana’s Children and a new work Joker (based on Hamlet) have recently been sold to Joanna Cotler Books (a division of HarperCollins US).

Henry Reynolds & Marilyn Lake

Non-fiction, Australian history

Two of Australia’s most respected historians have embarked on a new book on race titled Drawing the Global Colour Line, which has been contracted to MUP for Aust/NZ rights. World rights, excluding Aust/NZ, have been contracted to Cambridge University Press.

Andrew Riemer

Memoirs, translation, essays on cultural topics

A scholar, essayist and cultural journalist, Andrew was born in Budapest and arrived in Australia in 1947. The first volume of his memoirs, Inside Outside — Life Between Two Worlds, won the NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission Prize in 1992. This was followed byThe Habsburg Café (1992); America with Subtitles (1995); and Sandstone Gothic (1998). In his latest book, Between the Fish and the Mudcake, he reminisces on writers, books, food, music and places.
    Andrew’s biography of Robert Hughes, Hughes: End of Modernism, was published by Duffy & Snellgrove in 2001.
    He has recently turned to the translation of French literature. His translation of Ce Que Racontait by Catherine Rey will be published by Giramondo.
    A new non-fiction title, My Family’s History of Smoking, has been contracted to Melbourne University Press for publication in 2007.

Ros Reines

Gossip: A Novel

I’ve never wanted to give myself a more palatable title — diarist, social observer, society journalist I’m a gossip columnist, end of story Why mince words when I’m paid to dish the dirt?

Venous Ventura is the Gossip Queen, our numero uno gossip columnist. She loves her job and she loves the good life — designer heels, designer restaurants, hot scoops. So how did she end up enrolled in The Source, an exclusive self-help course in Byron Bay? Why is she being forced to ‘open her soul’ to a pack of needy socialites, earnest hippies and disturbed businessmen intent on finding their inner child, Divine truth and ways to make even more cash?

Throw Ruby Starr — celeb fashion designer and Venous’s arch enemy — into the mix, along with J.Lo and a swarm of social wannabes, and you’ve got chaos, razor-sharp satire, tears before bedtime and plenty of black humour. Ros Reines’ debut novel delivers a sparkling snapshot of the secrets and scandals that thrive in the city’s social jungle. Of course, it’s all fiction …

Ros Reines has a new website: http://www.rosreinesgossip.com/

Alison Rogers

Alison has worked in and around the media for the last twenty years and has edited and produced a collection of short stories for the ABC. For two years after that Alison was media adviser for Senator Natasha Stott Despoja. Her first book, The Natasha Factor: Politics, Media and Betrayal, was released by Lothian in 2004.

Leigh Sales

Journalism, non-fiction

Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks

Leigh Sales is the ABC’s National Security Correspondent. She visited Guantanamo Bay twice during her recent four-year posting as the network’s Washington correspondent. In 2005, she won a prestigious Walkley Award for her coverage of the Guantanamo military commissions and was nominated again in 2006 for her reporting of Hurricane Katrina.

Detainee 002 is a chilling reminder that, in a war with ever-changing rules and no end in sight, there are no limits. If you care about the Australia you live in, you must read this book.

“This is the story that Canberra didn’t want us to know —
it is scrupulously fair and a brilliant yarn.”  — Ray Martin

In a remote American military base at Guantanamo Bay, 385 enemy combatants sit waiting for their day in court. Among them is David Hicks, who was detained for five years until the March 2007 hearing where he pleaded guilty to the charge of providing material support for terrorism.

Detainee 002 reveals in unprecedented detail how an Australian citizen wound up in the War on Terror. Based on more than five years of reporting and dozens of interviews with insiders, Leigh Sales explains the intricacies of Hicks’s case, from his capture in Afghanistan, to life in Guantanamo Bay, to the behind-the-scene establishment and workings of the military commissions.

Sales impeccable research takes us from top-secret negotiations at the White House and Pentagon to the domestic fallout Hicks’s incarceration has had on his family, to the campaign that Major Michael Mori, the marine who becomes his greatest advocate, waged on his behalf.

David Hicks’s case is emblematic of some of the greatest challenges facing the world today: the rise of Islamic extremism, terrorism and the accountability of governments towards their citizens. It is a chilling reminder that, in a war with ever-changing rules and no end in sight, there are no limits.

Published by Melbourne University Publishing. Photo: Leigh Sales.

Margaret Simons

Novels, journalism

Her first novel The Ruthless Garden won the Angus and Robertson Bookworld prize for new novelists in 1993. Her last novel was The Truth Teller. A collection of her gardening columns, titled Wheelbarrows, was published by New Holland in 1999.
    Margaret’s investigate book on the inner workings of the parliamentary press gallery in Canberra, Fit to Print, was released in 1999 by UNSW Press.
    In 2003 Hodder Headline released The Meeting of the Waters: Secret Women’s Business
    Australia is the world’s oldest continent. The Murray is its longest river. The Meeting of the Waters is the story of what happened at the mouth of the Murray, when modern western European culture met older indigenous ways in a dispute about the building of a bridge. This is a story — part investigative journalism, part spiritual journey — about conflicting narratives of the land, and the fragility of European attempts to belong in the so-called ‘new world’.
    In the early 1990s there was a plan to build a bridge from the small town of Goolwa in Adelaide to Hindmarsh Isand, but Aboriginal women claimed the island was special to them for reasons that could not be revealed. They applied to the Federal Government for an order prohibiting the building of the bridge. As part of this process some of the women’s secrets were written down and sealed in envelopes marked ‘Confidential: to be read by women only’. The women were successful, and the Federal Government banned the bridge.
    About a year later another group of Aboriginal women came forward and said the claim of what had become known as ‘secret women’s business’ was a fabrication. A Royal Commission was set up. In December 1995 it found that the secret women’s business was indeed a fabrication. ‘Lies, lies, lies’ was the newspaper headline.
    When the author began to research this story she more or less assumed that the Royal Commission finding was correct. In the years since then she has come to believe that there are many reasons why the story of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge is one of the most important that can be told about the end of the last century.

Margaret’s most recent title is Resurrection in a Bucket, a book on the philosophy and implications of composting, published by Allen & Unwin.

Margeret has also completed a Quarterly Essay for Black Inc. on Mark Latham.

Stephen Smith

Fiction

Stephen Smith’s debut novel Stranger is a roller-coaster of a road story through a sub-culture of drugs, revenge and madness. At times its depiction of the world of addicts verges on the hilarious, but the story also has a sinister dimension. In the world of drug dealers and users, paranoia and violence are always waiting in the wings. Stranger was released by Random House Australia in 2006.

Phil Somerville

Cartoons

An outstandingly talented cartoonist, Phil Somerville has published work in newspapers and magazines including The Bulletin and The Australian’s Review of Books. For three years he held a weekly Friday satirical spot in the Sydney Morning Herald’s back page column Stay-in-Touch.

Laurie Stiller

Children’s fiction

In 1997 Random House published Laurie’s first children’s book Charlie Carver Stacks It! with brilliant illustrations by Jeff Raglus. The sequel, Packing it!, was released by Hodder Headline in February 2000. His illustrated children’s book Princess Max was released in 2000 by Random.

Peter Timms

Non-fiction, memoir, art writing

Currently Art Reviewer for The Age, Peter was for many years the editor of the journal Art Monthly. In 1986 Oxford University Press published his definitive volume Australian Studio Pottery and China Painting.
    Peter has recently compiled an anthology of essays on gardening titled The Nature of Gardens, released by Allen & Unwin.
    Among the contributors to this lively and unique collection are Marion Halligan, Margaret Scott, George Sedden and Alan Saunders.
    His next book, Making Nature, combines personal memoir and natural history to explore Thoreau’s conviction that the whole world can be revealed in our own backyard. It was published by Allen & Unwin in 2001.
    Peter’s latest book, What’s Wrong With Contemporary Art, was published by the University of New South Wales Press in 2004.
    Peter is currently writing a book based on Suburban Gardens for MUP.

You can read an excerpt from Making Nature on this site.

John Tranter

Poetry, reviews

John has published more than twenty books, including the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1992), co-edited with Philip Mead. Recent titles include the collection of poems Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998), Heart Print, Studio Moon and Trio (all Salt Publications, Cambridge UK), and a book of experimental computer-assisted prose pieces, Different Hands (Folio / Fremantle, 1998). John is the editor of the internationally popular literary quarterly Jacket, free on the Internet at http://jacketmagazine.com/

His latest collection of poems, Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected, was released in mid 2006, and won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2006 and the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for poetry in 2007.

Publisher’s blurb: Urban Myths:210 poems collects the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia. A generous selection of new work is also included. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter’s poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.

‘Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Tranter gives us... new, unpredictableways to describe the world — by turns energetic, exuberant, exasperated; hip, antipathetic, pathetic; attentive, fantastic, fed-up, ridiculous, serious...’  — Times Literary Supplement

(Australian/NZ rights: UQP; UK and US rights: Salt Publishing UK)

The Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL) project, which John Tranter started in 2004, has been funded with a major Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council. Professor Elizabeth Webby and Creagh Cole, from the University of Sydney, in association with CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited), will head a team of researchers to built a permanent and wide-ranging library of resources on the Internet. You can check its progress here: http://april.edu.au/

You can visit a homepage for John Tranter’s writing at a new, permanent address: johntranter.com, where you can read nearly over a thousand pages of poems, interviews, book reviews, including dozens of reviews of John’s various books, a biography and a bibliography, as well as a page of links to dozens of other sites on the Internet that relate to his writing.

Julienne van Loon

Fiction, essays

Julienne was the Winner of the 2004 Vogel Award. Her novel Road Story was released in 2005. In 2006 she completed a new novel Backtracking, set in and around Port Hedland in the inhospitable far North of Australia. This work has been contracted to Allen and Unwin for publication in 2007.
    Julienne van Loon is a writer who is unflinching in her portrayal of rural Australia.

Anna von Marburg

Cake design

Her witty cake designs, ranging from the free-form to the whole-heartedly baroque, have inspired a new generation of cake decorators. Her first book, Cakes in Bloom, was published by Allen & Unwin in 1993. She has since created The Birthday Book, filled once again with her original and awe-inspiring creations. It was published by Sue Hines at Allen & Unwin in 1999.

Michael Wagner

Young Readers

A prolific children’s author whose Maxx Rumble footy series has garnered a large fan base among young boys. Michael has now begun a new series about a family called the Undies, which has been contracted to Penguin Books Australia and is based on father/son relationships. Penguin / Puffin published the first volume in 2006: The Undies: Let the Games Begin. You can check out Michael’s new Web site here: http://www.michaelwagner.com.au/

Mark Wakely

Dream Home: Houses and the Imagination

Our homes occupy a central place in our imaginations. At the end of the day, they are where we cocoon ourselves and allow ourselves to dream.
    Mark Wakely takes the reader on a wonderful ride between womb and tomb as he looks at what our homes mean to us at different stages of our lives. As he wanders from room to room looking at the way we’ve made ourselves at home through history and across cultures, the author raises many surprising questions: Why do children all over the world draw houses the same way? What’s it like to work with an architect on a multi-million dollar house? What would drive a widow to spend 38 years building day and night an enormous and bizarre mansion?
    Dream Home is a book for anyone who’s ever made a house a home, and for all readers who question the notion of home. It is a book of universal appeal with numerous international references.

Sweet Sorrow: a beginner’s guide to death

Mark’s new book is remarkable: at times heart-breaking, at times humorous, it is dazzling for its profound honesty. Like most of us, Mark Wakely had always put death in the too-hard basket. He was curiously distanced from his own parents’ deaths. Thirty years later, he went on a journey to confront one of the most intensely personal yet universal experiences: our own mortality. With Mark as our guide, we are introduced to morticians and embalmers, rabbis and doctors, coffin makers and gravediggers. He reveals the fashions and the fads, the rituals and the deep emotion in a heartfelt and whimsical investigation into this timeless subject.

Mark Wakely is a Sydney-based writer, and a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National.

Murray Waldren

Non-fiction

Murray Waldren is the Literary Editor of The Australian newspaper. Dining Out With Mr Lunch is a collection of literary profiles published by the University of Queensland Press in 1999.
    His analytical feature on the Moran trial, A Family Act, was shortlisted for a Walkley Award.
    He then went on to write a book on the turbulent Moran family, Moran v Moran, which was published by HarperCollins Australia in 2001.

You can read an excerpt from Moran v Moran on this site.

Christine Wallace

Political and cultural journalism

. . . is a Canberra press gallery journalist of long standing. Her controversial biography of Germaine Greer, The Untamed Shrew, was published in 1997 in Australia and was released in the USA and the UK.

    Her latest title, The Private Don, based on a series of revealing letters by the normally reticent cricketer Sir Donald Bradman, was released by Allen & Unwin in late 2004.

Rachel Weiss

Travel, Memoir

At 39 Rachael Weiss took stock of her life. She was the eldest of three children, she had a degree, she had worked at various jobs in the corporate world but she was single. Armed with a romantic soul and a 1973 guide to Communist Czechoslovakia, Rachael left for Prague in search of her Bohemian roots.

She dreams of meeting poets — after all they had voted in a poet as their first President — but instead finds a nation of dentists who drink copious amounts of beer, eat potatoes by the barrel-load and, to her mind, are the most dour race on the planet. This book is a hilari

ous account of her first six months in one of the most beautiful and puzzling cities in the world.

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