Jo Case

This is an edited extract from Boomer & Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s, published this month.   We wake to the shrill of the phone. It’s Vanessa, calling to announce that she’ll be arriving early. She’s decided to make a banner, and she needs my help. Last night, after more drinks than usual, […]

At last year’s Adelaide Writers Festival, during a session on The Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature, an impassioned argument broke out on the subject of Australian writing. Robert Dessaix declared that, in our current age of globalisation, where national identities and national cultures are harder to define, there is no longer any such thing as […]

South African writer Barbara Trapido’s relationship to reading was changed forever when a favourite high school teacher, who read aloud to her class each day, just happened to choose Pride and Prejudice. The memory is immortalised in Trapido’s sixth novel, Frankie and Stankie (2003), her only strictly autobiographical book: ‘It’s like nothing she’s ever come […]