Featured Books:
Kirsten Tranter: A Common Loss
They were originally five. Elliot. Brian. Tallis. Cameron. And Dylan — charismatic Dylan — the mediator, the leader, the man each one turned to in a time of crisis. Five close friends, bonded in college, still coming together for their annual trip to Las Vegas. This year they are four. Four friends, sharing a common loss: Dylan’s tragic death. A common loss that, upon their arrival in Vegas, will bring with it a common threat: one that will make them question who their departed friend really was, and whether he is even worthy of their grief.
A Common Loss is Kirsten Tranter’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut, The Legacy. Yet again, Tranter’s weave of watertight prose and literary sensibilities shows her to be a born writer with a precocious control of storytelling and style.
Follow Kirsten’s internet diary: www.kirstentranter.com
A Common Loss: Fourth Estate / HarperCollins
Stephen Daisley
Traitor
Stop press: Traitor has won the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for 2011 and
the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing in the New South Wales Premiers’ Prize for 2011.
Gallipolli 1915: A young New Zealand soldier and a Turkish doctor meet in the chaos of battle. When a shell bursts overhead, David and Mahmoud are taken to the same military hospital. There, an unshakeable bond grows between them: naive shepherd and educated Sufi mystic. A bond such that, when the time comes, David will choose to betray his country for his friend. The savage punishment that follows will break David and make him anew. The compassion he finds within himself will touch the lives of his comrades in the trenches. And later, back in the hill country of New Zealand, it will wrench open the heart of a woman crazed by grief.
Traitor is a story of war, and love how each changes everything, forever. Evoking both brutality and transcendent beauty, Stephen Daisley’s astonishing debut novel will transport the reader heart and soul into another realm.
Stephen Daisley was born in 1955, and grew up in remote parts of the North Island of New Zealand. He served for five years in an infantry battalion of the NZ Army, and has worked on sheep and cattle stations, on oil and gas construction sites and as a truck driver and bartender, among many other jobs. He has university degrees in writing and literature and lives in Western Australia with his wife and five children. Traitor is his first novel.
John Tranter: Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP)
Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Age Poetry Book of the Year: from the judges’ comments:
“AFTER a career of more than 40 years, John Tranter has become that paradoxical thing: the postmodern master. Ghosting others’ poems, using “proceduralist” approaches to composition and revising and mistranslating “classic” works (such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal), Tranter produces something entirely original and — most importantly — superbly entertaining. The inventiveness of Starlight seems unending, offering us a countless array of brilliant images and atmospheres, hilarious ideas and compelling melanges of styles and registers. Starlight could well be Tranter’s masterpiece.” — David McCooey, The Saturday Age. Saturday 06 August 2011.
Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010) wins the
2011 Queensland Premier’s Award for poetry: from the judges’ comments:
This book can be seen as the culmination of John Tranter’s middle career, a period marked by explorations of the ways in which poems can be generated. The most important poem of the collection is probably the first, “The Anaglyph”, which already seems like the major Australian poem of this century so far. Here, an answer is written to Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” whereby the original is evacuated so that only the first and last words of each line remain and the new poem is written by retaining them. Although this description of «Starlight: 150 Poems» makes it seem formally obsessive, it is still a book of poems that has a lot to say and “The Anaglyph” — in part a parody, in part a homage and in part an answer to an early poem by Tranter’s great middle-period mentor — is very much a poem about those modern obsessions of textuality and influence.
“Reading the 150 poems in this collection is to spend time in the company of a writer steeped (well-versed?) in the work of other poets, and able to assume different narrative voices at will. There are poems inspired by the French poet Baudelaire, American John Ashbery and T S Eliot. Infiltrating his work is a dry, laconic wit and a rich understanding of culture and history. … A particular pleasure was the lively sequence ‘At the Movies’, which ruminates on films of the past, and Tranter’s updated response to Baudelaire’s celebrated Les Fleurs du mal, which is every bit as wicked and visceral as the original.”
— Andrew Wilkins, Bookseller+Publisher
John Tranter has published over twenty books. His «Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected» (UQP, 2006) won more major awards than any book of poetry in Australia’s history.
See John Tranter’s homepage: johntranter.com — over a thousand pages of poems, interviews, book reviews, photographs, a biography, a bibliography, over 160 pages of detailed notes to poems, and lots more.
Malcolm Knox
One of Australia’s most highly acclaimed and versatile writers, Malcolm Knox has published five books. The former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Malcolm won a Walkley award in 2004 for the exposé of fraudulent author Norma Khouri. He was runner up for Journalist of the Year 2004.
The Life
He looked into the Pacific and the Pacific looked back into him.
Now bloated and paranoid, former champion surfer and legend Dennis Keith is holed up in a retirement village, shuffling to the shop for an ice lolly every day, barely existing behind his aviator sunnies and crazy OCD rules, and trying not to think about the waves he’d made his own and the breaks he once ruled like a god.
Years before he’d been robbed of the world title that had his name on it — and then drugs, his family and the disappearance of his girlfriend had done the rest.
Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories he thought he’d buried. It takes Dennis a while to realise that she’s not there to write his story at all.
Australian edition cover
‘For many years now when asked which are the contemporary Australian writers I
admire, Malcolm Knox is always one of the first I name. His new novel, The Life,
is alternately evocative and lacerating, tender and unflinching, a gloriously
honest, brutal and moving story of a man who was at the top of his game and then
pissed it all away. The voice in this novel is urgent, the pace propulsive and
the experience of reading it is thrilling. This is the work of a master
storyteller and writer, the work of someone who deeply cares and is committed to
language. This is a book from someone at the top of their game. The Life
is wonderful, and Malcolm Knox is one of the best novelists writing in the world
today. That’s not opinion, that’s fact.’ — Christos
Tsiolkas
‘Funny, heartbreaking and humane, The Life confirms what the Literary Review has known all along — Knox is, quite simply a fabulous writer’.’
Malcolm Knox is the author of eleven previous books including the novels Summerland, Adult Book, winner of a Ned Kelly Award, and Jamaica, winner of the Colin Roderick Award. His nonfiction books include Secrets of the Jury Room and Scattered: The Inside Story of Ice in Australia. Formerly literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, he has twice won Walkley awards for journalism and been runner-up for the Australian Journalist of the Year award. He lives in Sydney with his wife and two children.
The Life has been published by Allen and Unwin in Australia and Allen and Unwin/ Atlantic Books in the UK.
Nobel Prize for Literature 2000
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.
