Culture

Sam van Zweden Using her brilliant wit as a tool for political activism, writer Lindy West has fought for social justice issues such as fat liberation and abortion rights. The author of Shrill – now an acclaimed TV series – and The Witches Are Coming speaks about her work. “There’s something intoxicating about being defiant, especially when you start to articulate all the ways in which your life has been made smaller and more difficult by systems of power.”

Rosemary Forde A pioneer of the arte útil movement – in which art goes beyond aesthetics and is a tool for social change – Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera aims to transform audiences through her politically charged work. “I have been fighting not only for my ideas but also to break this illusion that art to be art has to be useless, has to be apolitical.”

Peter Craven Once a powerhouse of Australian publishing, Hilary McPhee traded the comfortable life she knew for a mysterious job with Middle Eastern royalty. In writing about this adventure and the collapse of her marriage to Don Watson in her new memoir, Other People’s Houses, she traces her strange journey back to herself. “I dreaded coming back to Australia because I left feeling I’d lost everything, I’d lost my marriage. We’d been together for more than 20 years, so it was quite a lot of life.”

Steve Dow A screen actor since he was 10 years old, Damon Herriman is all too aware of the precarities in his line of work. He speaks to Steve Dow about the ups and downs of his career and his new film, Judy and Punch. “It has a dark fairytale vibe. You can watch Judy and Punch as an allegory or a feminist revenge tale, or you could watch it as a really entertaining fairytale fable, or both.”

Tommy Murphy Packer & Sons looks at the extremes of Australian masculinity through the lens of its two most successful media dynasties. “It would be impossible to stage Packer & Sons, a play about three generations of Packer power, without the Murdochs. The two competing families have brawled, collaborated and defined themselves against each other. The Murdochs are the Greeks to the Packers’ Roman gods.”

Brodie Lancaster Harry Styles’ second solo album, Fine Line, is at its best when the pop star reveals his vulnerable side, but the record needs some reining in.

Lisa Radford At NGV International, an architectural collaboration between Edition Office and Yhonnie Scarce invites visitors to reflect on the erasures of colonisation.

Steve Dow Tommy Murphy’s Packer & Sons at Belvoir examines the inherited and inherent misbehaviour and barbarism of Australia’s best-known media dynasties.

Simon Webster A visit to the Lisbon apartment of polymath activist António Serzedelo.

Sarah Price The writer of Memoirs of a Suburban Girl on her long road out of a violent relationship. “There I am, right in the middle of my teenage years and suddenly in a serious relationship. A relationship that pushes away my other life. Being hit was beyond my world experience. I didn’t want it to happen again. I started treading a little bit more carefully, and that set up a power dynamic.”

Cass Moriarty A chat with theatre designer Tracy Grant Lord, side stage at a rehearsal for Twelfth Night.

Sam van Zweden Using her brilliant wit as a tool for political activism, writer Lindy West has fought for social justice issues such as fat liberation and abortion rights. The author of Shrill – now an acclaimed TV series – and The Witches Are Coming speaks about her work. “There’s something intoxicating about being defiant, especially when you start to articulate all the ways in which your life has been made smaller and more difficult by systems of power.”

Reviewer: Fiona Wright Incidental Inventions collects 52 short essays written by the much-loved and famously reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante for The Guardian over a year. Ferrante describes the project as “a collaboration” – having …

Reviewer: Andrew Fuhrmann Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, that epic medley of transfiguration and rebirth, is one of the more controversial texts in the canon of European literature because so many of the myths it narrates involve some form of sexual violence. In Wake, …