Marginalia
What do readers want?
UWA Publishing Australian publishing book industry on reading Publishing
‘Historically speaking,’ said one of the visiting publishers at the Australia Council’s 2016 publishing scheme, ‘Koreans read for educational purposes. Only recently have we started reading for pleasure. This is why non-fiction books are very big in our market: business books, science…but literary fiction is starting to sell very well.’
Forever in print, or: Notes on printing and publishing at the time of the Bard
UWA Publishing Martin Luther Printing Publishing Shakespeare Shakespeare400
It is difficult to overstate Shakespeare’s influence on language and popular culture. After a while it becomes hard to tune him out; he’s on screen, in political speeches, in marketing campaigns, on The Simpsons. You try to escape, slither back into your pre-Shakespearean world for a moment; huddle up in front of a Disney film. Then someone pipes up, ‘Did you know The Lion King is based on Hamlet?’ This man, it seems, single-handedly changed the course of Western popular imagination. He gave us new words with which to express ourselves; characters that have proven immortal; thoughts on love and death that remain relevant.
An extract from Extinctions by Josephine Wilson
UWA Publishing Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript Extinctions Josephine Wilson
Sunday January 17, 2006
Out the window there was nothing that could be called poetry, nothing wind-swept, billowing, tossing or turning in a streaky sky, nothing other than a taut blue sky and the low drone of air conditioners. In car parks across the city women pulled on soft cotton hats and cowered under brollies. Babies kicked and squalled, itchy with heat rash. Fridges groaned. Water dripped from old rubber seals. Milk soured. Fans turned. The grid strained.
Small-m mentor: Terri-ann White remembers Veronica Brady (1929-2015)
UWA Publishing Terri-ann White Veronica Brady Westerly Centre
My testimony is all about care and community.
I was straight out of university, after a detour in rock and roll entrepreneurship: wild nights and risky behavior. At 23, because in those days BA degrees could last as long as you wanted them to, I opened a bookshop in Perth. A bookshop full of books I was interested in – one of those rare enterprises where self-interest works. Through my role as owner and operator of this bookshop, I was initiated into another world: of ideas, passion, politics and commitment to a personal ethics of care and responsibility.
Getting to know Mick: Suzanne Falkiner on writing the first biography of Randolph Stow
UWA Publishing Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow Perth Writers Festival PWF16 Randolph Stow Suzanne Falkiner
Randolph Stow at Adelaide University, October 1957
Collection: ABC publicity photograph: National Archives of Australia NAA
One of the surprising things about researching the life of Randolph Stow is to find out how surprising he is. Outside Western Australia at least, and among those who remember him at all, people tend to think of him as a quiet recluse, associated in his childhood with rural Geraldton, who in later life lived in an English backwater and, after writing a handful of extraordinary novels, gradually retreated from public life.