Moon Sugar is a genre-defying novel in which two people are thrown together to search for a lover and friend across Europe, while the bodily effects of a strange experiment begin to show. Moon Sugar is a playful and life-affirming novel that asks how we might make the most of our power in the face of fear, loss, and the unknown.
https://literaryminded.com.au/
https://transitlounge.com.au/shop/moon-sugar/
Image credit: Moon Sugar by Angela Meyer
Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry was founded in 2011 and has since seen more than 30 issues into print. A pioneer in the field, Rabbit celebrates the potential for poetry to explore and interrogate the boundaries of nonfiction writing. Rabbit encourages poets to openly engage with auto/biography, history, politics, economics, mathematics, cultural analysis, science, the environment, and all other aspects of real-world experience, recollection and interpretation.
non/fictionLab members involved in the journal's production include Jessica L. Wilkinson (Founder/Managing Editor), Tracy O'Shaughnessy (Publications Manager) and Zoe Dzunko (Website Manager). Students of the Bowen Street Press (Master of Writing and Publishing program) also assist the editorial team.
Image credit: Rabbit journal, Issue 31 – Science
Avantwhatever is a publishing platform for experimental digital sound, art and design. Founded in 2008 by organiser Ben Byrne, its activities include releases, concerts, festivals and other events, both online and offline. It is committed to the development and presentation of new work, with a focus on decentralised, ethical and sustainable practices. There have been three editions of the biennial Avantwhatever Festival, presented in 2016, 2018 and 2020 in partnership with RRR FM and with support from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Image credit: Tom Smith, Core Principles, Avantwhatever Festival 2020
The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-adversary-9780143796640
Image credit: The Adversary by Ronnie Scott
Locating Australian Literary Memory (Anthem Press, 2019) explores sites which are explicitly connected with Australian authors through material forms of commemoration such as houses, graves, statues and assorted artefacts. The focus is on eleven Australian authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon. Each of these writers offers different perspectives on the conventions of literary commemoration from the nineteenth century onwards.
Rather than advocating for the creation of more literary monuments, or the further preservation of memorials that currently exist, Locating Australian Literary Memory seeks to reveal the many blind spots, contradictions, challenges and eccentricities of literary commemoration in Australia. While observing the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables their construction, this book argues for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise authors and storytellers who have been hitherto overlooked.
https://www.anthempress.com/locating-australian-literary-memory-hb
Image credit: Locating Australian Literary Memory by Brigid Magner
The novel, Hasina, applies Dr Michelle Aung Thin’s research into ideas of home and hybridity in southeast Asia to the recent genocide of the Rohingya, a Muslim group in Myanmar characterised as ‘migrants’ by the military and the civilian government. Hasina was commissioned and published by Allen & Unwin in September 2019. It is published as Crossing the Farak River (Annick 2020) in the USA and Canada, where it has been widely reviewed in outlets including Kirkus, Quill and Quire and the School Library Journal. It was selected by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a notable book for Spring 2020 and the Canadian Writer’s Trust, for a #ReadtheWord award.
Image credit: Hasina by Michelle Aung Thin
The Thinking Woman (NewSouth 2019) is a major literary non-fiction work that seeks to address the absence of living women philosophers in contemporary public discourse by forming a dialogue with their philosophical work in a manner accessible to a broad readership. Identity formation as a collective, kinetic work-in-progress is central to the methodology. This project was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and by Creative Victoria. It was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Non-fiction (2020) and has been published in the US with Rutgers University Press (2020).
Image credit: The Thinking Woman by Julienne van Loon
The Near and the Far Volume II (Scribe 2019) is a companion volume to The Near and the Far (2016), both anthologies edited by Francesca Rendle-Short and David Carlin.
Spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the Asia-Pacific’s finest writers — including Christos Tsiolkas, Alice Pung, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Han Yujoo, Ellen van Neerven, and Ali Cobby Eckermann — The Near and The Far, Volume II invites readers on a unique and unforgettable journey.
Maxine Beneba Clarke writes in the foreword: ‘In a world where face-to-face contact is increasingly rare, and ugly forms of nationalism continue to separate and divide us, both the WrICE program and The Near and The FarVolume II are like a true light, shining across a darkness we must surely cast off together.’
https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/the-near-and-the-far-volume-2
Image credit: The Near and the Far Volume II
Music Made Visible is a poetic biography on the life and works of George Balanchine, one of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century. Jessica L. Wilkinson explores the possibilities and imaginative leaps that poetry can offer to the writing of a life. Her poetic series of Balanchine 'ballets' unfold from his early life as a student at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, through his engagement at Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, to his later co-founding and development of the New York City Ballet. Wilkinson's poems are attuned to the ephemeral qualities of music and movement that were so vital to her subject's life.
https://vagabondpress.net/products/wilkinson-balanchine
Image credit: Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine by Jessica L. Wilkinson
The Tiniest House of Time is a rare window into a world of untold histories of the voiceless diaspora in places and times where the enemy might be different, but the trauma, prejudice and hatred remain the same. History works in cycles, repeating itself, until we finally understand that everything that has happened, has always already happened.
“The Tiniest House of Time is an unforgettable portrait of an Indian-Malaysian family caught in the maelstrom of history and of a young woman who must make sense of all that she’s inherited and all that she’s lost. Iyer has written a truly epic novel, smart beautiful tough and wise. Not to be missed.” - Junot Diaz
Awards:
Shortlisted for the SPN Book of the Year 2021
https://www.wilddingopress.com.au/shop/p/9781925893069
Image credit: The Tiniest House of Time by Sreedhevi Iyer
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.
Acknowledgement of Country
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.