culture

The Boy from the Mish is a tender portrait of teenage sexuality that disrupts the white male gaze in Western storytelling. Gary Lonesborough’s debut young adult novel arose from the lack of YA stories “centred around an Aboriginal teen coming to...

Koa Beck’s new book examines how white feminism’s commodification and systematic exclusions are rooted in a knotted history of racism.

A secret agent is like a novelist – watching, constantly, but in a clandestine way so that associates don’t suspect the close observation and dissection of their lives. Similarly, a child sent to boarding school learns to watch and fit in, chameleon...

I grew up thinking there were seven fundamental flavours: suān, tián, k ǔ , là, xián, xiān, má. The first five translate easily – sour, sweet, bitter, hot, salty – but the other two don’t own a home on the English tongue. It was a shock to realise...

Feelings of desperation and unhappiness “are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment”, said Francis Bacon, one of the most notorious figures of 20th-century art, “because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility”...

After more than a decade away from publishing, Claire Thomas’s much anticipated second novel The Performance puts her squarely back in the limelight.

You’ll know Simon Winchester from The Surgeon of Crowthorne , his mega-selling account of how W. C. Minor helped write the first Oxford English Dictionary while ensconced in an asylum for the criminally insane. That book contained a story with a...

Minarets is a New Zealand/Aotearoa-based journal dedicated to the publication of poetry from the Pacific region – “while sea-levels still permit”, as the journal qualifies. This latest issue is guest edited by the Australian poet Pam Brown, whose...

“Calm to violent; sweet to salty; alive to dead,” contemplates Ray, a character in “Aboriginal Alcatraz”, reflecting on the dualities of the islands depicted in pakana writer Adam Thompson’s debut short story collection, Born Into This . Some...