Culture

An unexpectedly joyous documentary series highlights how many people struggle with literacy every day.

The Artful Escape’s exuberant style and psychedelic soundtrack can’t mask its essential superficiality.

Paintbox, belonging to Isaac Smith, who carried it on the voyage of the Endeavour (1768-1771) and the later voyages of the Resolution (1772-1775 and 1776-1779). Smith was the midshipman cousin of the wife of the captain, the famous Captain …

Marcus Whale’s singular music spans popular and classical forms to expose the monstrous transcendence of desire.

In opening up interior terrains, the survival series Alone makes other reality television look like pantomime.

Poet Jazz Money talks about how Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria has inspired her work and paved the way for other Indigenous writers.

Across the world, readers are lining up to buy 30-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. It follows Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), the latter having sold …

“I do not feel or see myself as something that is separate and different from Yindjibarndi Country,” Michael Woodley told the Federal Court in 2017, “because my spirit comes from my Country and is always connected to it.” Woodley, chief executive …

Monique Truong often stumbles upon her characters in the margins of other books, appearing at the edges of another’s story. The protagonist of her award-winning debut novel, The Book of Salt (2003), appeared first in The Alice B. Toklas …

Charif Majdalani is one of Lebanon’s most laurelled novelists. Born in Beirut in 1960, he writes in French and has been celebrated across the Francophone world. He lived in France for 13 years from 1980 and was later a professor of French literature …

Claire-Louise Bennett’s 2015 novel Pond was a minor masterpiece offering an account in granular detail of the life of a solitary woman living on the west coast of Ireland. Her second novel, Checkout 19, is more expansive in scope and …

The Christchurch earthquake of February 22, 2011 hammered Michelle Tom’s house, but the terror didn’t stop that day. It was repeated in the “ten thousand aftershocks” of her memoir’s title. One day the following December after two giant aftershocks, …