Celebrate Booktoberfest with Booktopia and Penguin and you could win this amazing prize pack worth over $900! Just buy any title in Penguin’s Booktoberfest Showcase and you could win! Click here to enter Penguin’s showcase Our Top Pick The Silver Moon by Bryce Courtenay Each of us has a place to return to in our minds, a place of clarity and peace, a place to think, to create, to dr... Read more

I read when I was young but not a lot, as I was an outside kid who had paddocks to play in and cubbies to build. At school, I only read what I had to for class and then after I left school it was as if I forgot to read. I was busy with work. It wasn’t until I was twenty and working as a teachers aid that I was reintroduced to the joy of books. I read Mem Fox’s book on how important it is to rea... Read more

Looking back, I’ve had a pretty busy fourteen years. As a writer, here are just some of the things I’ve got up to: – I spent ten months running a winery-restaurant in the Clare Valley. – My two sisters and I had a big falling out and didn’t speak to each other for three years. – I moved to New York, where I not only found a job with a cantankerous old woman, but also met the l... Read more

When I first sat down to chronicle the past two decades of our lives creating our garden at Wychwood, it never occurred to me that the actual routine of writing would weigh more heavily on my mind than the words themselves. I’ve never been short of words. More often than not I am the person who fills awkward silences with an excess of them for fear of losing the company of the person next to me... Read more

The Booktopia Book Guru asks Stephanie Alexander author of The Cook’s Companion Six Sharp Questions ___________ 1. Congratulations, you have a new book. What is it about and what does it mean to you? Not a new book at all but a thorough revision of my classic and very successful The Cook’s Companion. 2. Times pass. Things change. What are the best and worst moments that you have exp... Read more

In 2005 I was awarded a May Gibbs Fellowship and as a result was given a month’s use of a studio in Adelaide, South Australia. My main objective was to begin work on a new book. Along with that, I agreed to regularly spend time with the grade 5 girls at Seymour College in Adelaide. Mary Clark was the teacher librarian at Seymour at the time and we communicated for several months before I arrive... Read more

Celebrate Booktoberfest with Booktopia and Walker Books and you could win this amazing prize pack worth over $600!!! Just buy any title in Walker Books’ Booktoberfest Showcase and you could win! Click here to enter Walker Books’ showcase Our Top Pick The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson Ever wanted to know why Magnus Bane is banned from Peru? O... Read more

I’m a keen reader of non-fiction including authors such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which provided an early warning of the coming environmental crisis; Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order; and The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, including an analysis of hidden Christian texts such as the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalene, challen... Read more

There wasn’t a time when I didn’t hanker after books. I grew up seeing the deep pleasure my mother got from reading and wanted it for myself. Pocket money funded my little girl obsession with pony stories as I fell utterly under the spell of the Pullein-Thompson sisters and Pat Smythe. The English horsey world they wrote about was so far removed from my Australian farm life but I was living it ... Read more

Writing Mr Hong gave me the opportunity to reminisce about the early stages of my career and think about exactly why I chose a life in food. Putting it all down on paper was a lot of fun and gave me the opportunity to think about the significant moments in my food journey that changed everything for me. Mr Hong is full of recipes, of course, and stories about my life to date – from growin... Read more