Culture

Susan Chenery Since arriving on the music scene as a teenager in the band George, Katie Noonan has been an evolving artist. Now, she’s seeking to empower fellow female singer–songwriters in rural Australia.

Peter Craven As a child, Downton Abbey’s Charles Edwards listened to the classic My Fair Lady recording with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Now he's playing Henry Higgins, with Andrews directing.

Romy Ash As an actress on the rise, Angourie Rice is determined to find roles beyond the cookie-cutter teenage girls. Here, she talks about the importance of female representation, working with Kidman and Coppola, and frocking up for The Beguiled.

Sarah Price When no studio wanted to touch Fight Club, producer Ross Grayson Bell fought hard to get the film green-lighted. Now, he’s back home in Australia and pulling no punches with budding storytellers.

Steve Dow Ben Mendelsohn, currently seen in the harrowing drama Una, has adapted to life in the US, where he has become an in-demand film actor. But his teen years spent living there were more tumultuous. “The cultural shift was profound and deeply weird to me. I couldn’t make any sense of who those strange beings were.”

Christos Tsiolkas In remaking The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola has captured some beautiful and atmospheric moments of the antebellum south. But, the film fails to confront the defining issues of the time.

Helen Razer Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s sharp comedy Catastrophe gets to the truth of love and marriage, in all its strain and splendour.

Patrick Hartigan An eclectic collection at UNSW Galleries explores human interaction with working models, as they straddle the divide between the imagined and the functional.

Maxine Beneba Clarke Waiting for Peak Uncomfortable Gonzo with John Safran.

Omar J. Sakr A drive with founder of western Sydney literary collective Sweatshop, Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Josephine Rowe Tasmanians Christo Mills and David Bretz on moving from the blockade to the pathway.

Reviewer: LS In My Lovely Frankie, the acclaimed YA writer Judith Clarke’s latest novel, Tom Rowland is 16 years old in the 1950s when he has a religious epiphany of sorts. He’s so struck that he defies the wishes of his loving but not terribly …

Reviewer: FL Eric Blair died for want of a typist. Self-exiled to a remote Scottish island and hollowed out by tuberculosis, he quailed at the prospect of typing a clean manuscript copy of his just-completed novel. Despite an SOS to his publishers, no typist eventuated. …

Reviewer: KN Some of the most exciting, tonally ambitious and uncompromising fiction that has been published in Australia in recent years has come from Aboriginal authors – most notably, the remarkable Waanyi writer Alexis Wright and the extraordinary Noongar …