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Congratulations to 2019 Stella Prize winner, Vicki Laveau-Harvie
The winner of this year’s Stella Prize is Vicki Laveau-Harvie for her dark memoir The Erratics, described by the judges as ‘an evocative and expansive view of a family that has more than its fair share of dysfunction’. This is Laveau-Harvie’s first book and it went out of print just six months after its release in June last year when publisher, Finch Publishing, went out of business. When the book was long-listed for the Stella Prize Laveau-Harvie was signed by an agent and The Erratics was picked up for reissue by Harper Collins imprint Fourth Estate. It is a story of the precariousness of publishing, with the moral that authors should never lose hope!
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Hidden women of history
From princess, priestess, and poet Enheduanna, the world’s first known author, to Tarpé Mills, creator of the first female superhero in print – the stiletto-wielding Miss Fury – there are innumerable women that histories have ignored. If you haven’t been following The Conversation series on ‘Hidden women of history’, add it to your reading list. You will be fascinated and moved by stories of artists, activists, revolutionaries and ordinary women, like Hop Lin Jong, who is only known to us because, in 1925, her daughter Ruby was murdered.
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What we’ve been reading
Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (Penguin, 2015) is a novel in two parts, half the print run published with one part first, half with the parts swapped. Now Jane has read her copy, she can’t imagine reading the novel in the other order. This publishing trick may sound gimmicky, but while pushing the limits of what a novel can be, Smith’s writing is, as always, never less than compelling. Another novel which wears its literary credentials on its sleeve is Gerald Murnane’s Border District (Giramondo, 2017). Jane read it as an illustration of how memory works, the moments Murnane excavates recognisable and thought-provoking. Roughneck, Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel (Simon and Schuster, 2016) and The Hamilton Case, an early novel from the phenomenal Michelle de Kretser (Vintage, 2004) are both extraordinary evocations of place which took Jane far from home, to northern Canada and Sri Lanka respectively. Physically a safer way to travel, though the heart can still come away bruised.
Aidan has been dipping in and out of many books amidst the distractions of work and life. Some that he has been particularly enjoying are Mark Brandi’s The Rip (Hachette Australia, 2019), the follow up to his highly successful debut Wimmera (Hachette Australia, 2017), Ginger Gorman’s Troll Hunting (Hardie Grant, 2019), an investigation into the world of online trolls, and Bruce Pascoe’s widely acclaimed history of Aboriginal agriculture, Dark Emu (Magabala Books, 2014).
Karen has been absorbed in Fiona MacCarthy’s hefty biography of Edward Burne-Jones, The Last Pre-Raphaelite (Faber, 2012). Her love for Burne-Jones work has been a life-time affair, attracted as a teenager to the artist’s desire to make the world beautiful and the tense stillness of his romantic, sexually ambivalent, work. Karen has accompanied the biography with reading the exhibition catalogue of Tate Britain’s recent retrospective which she had the joy of seeing earlier this year. Burne-Jones remains enigmatic but MacCarthy’s delicious telling of his life and loves, family and friends, is beautifully illustrated (including many of his self-deprecating and gently teasing cartoons) and superbly satisfying.
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Caption: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bt., William Morris reading poetry to Edward Burne-Jones, 1861, Victoria & Albert Museum.
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