The 1st of November was National Authors Day, and we can’t thank them enough! We want to celebrate all the fantastic authors who have provided stories for us to read, share and enjoy year-after-year.

To celebrate this month, we have put together some tips for creative writing plus included some of our favourite works of literary fiction.

Is this out of loyalty to her mother’s memory? Or to comfort her father? Perhaps she wants to find peace with Hugh, her earnest husband in whose house she most uncomfortably lives? Or is the lure Thomas, who alone can appreciate Clementine’s own sensuality, and her humour, but who must remain another of her secrets. In The Mint Lawn, the late Gillian Mears wrote a debut novel to be read with pleasure and remembered with joy.

This month we have 2 x 2 reading selections to give away. 

Another pandemic is sweeping the globe; Mooney’s new home is filling up fast, resources are scarce, infrastructure is crumbling, and he has to share an increasingly cramped existence with a group of people still traumatised by their own deaths. And although he should know better, he remains in the grip of the same fear as when he was alive: the opinions of others. Narrated with the ironic hindsight afforded by life beyond the mortal plane, Here Goes Nothing is a razor-sharp, hilariously entertaining, insightful and moving meditation on our 21st-century world, and the intricate relationship between love and death.

Thanks to Penguin.

This book charts how the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current predicament: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism. This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the past 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the hostility of the Liberal-National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC over the past nine years. Amid this, Who Needs the ABC? identifies the vital role that the ABC has played and continues to play in Australia today: in its award-winning journalism, its array of cultural programming on television, radio, and online, and the comprehensive service it provides, geographically and culturally, to people across the country. At a time when the truth has to vie with obfuscation and misinformation, this book offers a rejoinder to the ABC’s critics, points to a way out of the ABC’s current predicament, and answers the question posed by the title. Who Needs the ABC? We do.

Thanks to Scribe   

She returned to France before the First World War to visit family and was bombed repeatedly out of homes there and captured by the Germans. She was a prisoner of war. One story even has her in a concentration camp. She survived, returned to Perth in 1947, and took up business again in Roe Street, having made a fortune from the rent collected from her brothels while she was a prisoner of war, up until her death in 1953.

Thanks to Fremantle Press

This book tells the dual stories of Bell’s remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has researched this story for over a decade, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her deaf family set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and technology.

Thanks to Scribe

Anyone is welcome to enter. To go in the draw, simply email us at competition@cae.edu.au and let us know your favourite books about Profound Transformations. Include your name and postal address. Entries close on Friday December 2nd. We will notify the winners and we may use their answers on social media.