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This is the Australian Literary Management homepage. Our office (in Balmain, Sydney, see below) is open from Tuesday to Friday, and closed on Mondays. Please note: We do not accept unsolicited personal visits.

Here’s a useful link: [»] the Australian Literary Agents’ Association Internet site:
Literary contacts, Finding an agent, Code of Practice, list of ALAA Members.

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Link: Are you a writer looking for an agent? [»] This page outlines what we do, how to contact us, and how to submit your work to us. Please note: We do not consider children’s books by unpublished authors.

 

Featured Books:

Guide to Dying cover

Debra Adelaide:
The Household Guide to Dying

This is a brilliant, original work which charts one woman’s attempts to make provision for her husband and daughters — from writing lists on the fridge to teaching her 8-year-old to make boiled eggs — and to confront a ghost from the past. Delia has made a living writing an acerbic advice column and a series of wildly successful modern household guides. As the book opens, she has only a short time to live. Going about the ordinary routines of daily life, she is consumed by two things: how to make provision for her husband and daughters — and how to make her peace with the past. She feels the need for the type of manual she has made her living writing; only this time it will be about dying. Not a guide to bereavement, but, as she puts it, a book about the state when you know you’re going to die, but you’re not dying yet.

Debra Adelaide and friend. Photo © Philip Klaunzer

Debra Adelaide and friend
Photo © Philip Klaunzer

At the same time, she attempts to return to the places of her past, to lay a ghost and see someone who is very much alive as she prepares to say goodbye. The two stories interweave, and each section opens with very funny snippets from Delia’s acerbic advice column, and, later, her Household Guide to Dying.

Published by Pan Picador Australia.

Launched in May, 2008

 

Riemer cover image

Andrew Riemer:
A Family History of Smoking

A compelling memoir about two European families living through the tragic last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From great-grandfather David, who saw his family’s fortunes decline with the gradual rise of anti-Semitism, to the ultra-modern, glamorous mother who held her family together through World War II, Andrew Riemer paints a beautiful portrait of a now vanished world that literally went up in smoke. Set against the backdrop of the tumult of early twentieth-century Europe, A Family History of Smoking is full of eccentric characters, literary anecdotes and historical drama, and is a moving tribute to a family, its strength and its stories.


“As the bombs fell, they lived underground in the Budapest cellars, and when hostilities ended, she rescued her husband, then near death. Riemer remembers his mother crouching on the floor by his father’s side, watching over him by the faint light of a shoelace floating in oil in the lid of a tin of bootpolish… As an excursion into the past and into the self, it is a fine achievement.”
The Age.

 

Sweet Sorrow: cover image

Mark Wakely:
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.

 

Nobel Prize for Literature 2000

Gao Xingjian photo

Gao Xingjian

Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian became a critic of the Communist regime as a young man. He fled Beijing and has lived for many years in France where his first novel, Soul Mountain, was first published and became a bestseller, going into five editions. In 2000 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mabel Lee’s English translation of Soul Mountain has been a success worldwide.
     Gao’s second novel One Man’s Bible focuses the political horrors of the twentieth century through the lens of desire and memory. It has received rave reviews in the US.
     In 2004 Gao published a collection of short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather. In September 2006 HarperCollins Australia released A Case for Literature, a collection of thought-provoking essays.
     Mabel Lee is Gao’s English-language translator. She is represented by Australian Literary Management, and ALM is the lead agent for the English language translations of Gao’s writing.
      You can read the first chapter of Soul Mountain on this website, as well as Mabel’s perceptive and informative Introduction to the book, the Swedish Academy’s bibliographical note published on the occasion of the 2000 Nobel Prize, and a note about the author.
     Rights in the English language translation of Soul Mountain have been sold to HarperCollins Australia, HarperCollins US, and HarperCollins UK.


Other links: [»] For a list of writers from overseas represented in Australia by ALM, follow this link to our overseas authors page.

[»] Our Bookstore Links page lists over twenty bookstores around the world.

[»] Visit Jacket magazine — a free literary magazine sponsored by ALM.

[»] The APRIL project (which John Tranter started in 2004 with a prototype site sponsored by ALM) has been funded with a major Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council. Professor Elizabeth Webby and Creagh Cole (University of Sydney) and CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited), will head a team of researchers to built a permanent and wide-ranging library of resources on the Internet, named Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL) and located on the University of Sydney Library Internet server in 2008. Here is the draft site: http://april.edu.au/


About us: Australian Literary Management was founded in 1980 in Melbourne, and is now based in Balmain, a harbourside suburb ten minutes from the centre of Sydney. We look after the business affairs of authors around the world, negotiating their contracts and managing their careers.

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Our office is open from Tuesday to Friday, and closed on Mondays.
We do not accept unsolicited personal visits.

Australian Literary Management
2-A Booth Street, Balmain NSW 2041, Australia

Tel Sydney 9818 8557
Interstate add (02+) – International add (612+)

[»] Send ALM an email enquiry. (Please do not send manuscript submissions by email unless we specifically ask you to.)

This is ALM's homepage, at: http://www.austlit.com/index.html

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