Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum has just been announced as the winner of the 2015 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship at the Adelaide Writers Festival tonight, the announcement followed the Hazel Rowley Memorial Lecture, given by David Marr. “Caroline Baum’s proposed biography of Lucie Dreyfus is ambitious in scope, international in reach and blazingly original,” said Jani... Read more

Debra Oswald is the co-creator and head writer of the TV series Offspring which recently finished its fifth season. She chats to Caroline Baum about her transition to adult fiction with her darkly funny new novel Useful. Grab a copy of Debra Oswald’s Useful here Useful by Debra Oswald Once a charming underachiever, he’s now such a loser that he can’t even commit suicide proper... Read more

James Bradley’s past novels Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist have won or been shortlisted for a number of major literary awards. He chats with Caroline Baum about his new novel Clade. Grab a copy of James Bradley’s Clade here  Clade by James Bradley Compelling, challenging and resilient, over ten beautifully contained chapters, Clade canvasses three generations from the... Read more

Booktopia’s Editorial Director Caroline Baum has been named a finalist for the 2015 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, awarded annually to an Australian writer for a proposed biographical work. The Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship was established in 2011 to encourage Australian authors to attain a high standard of biography writing and to commemorate the life, ideas and writing of Hazel Ro... Read more

Peter Sheridan is a man possessed by a peculiar but persistent affection for bakelite – the world’s first synthetic plastic. To some, this material may appear unlovely and charmless, but to Sheridan it is the stuff of poetry. As a result, he has become one of the world’s foremost collectors of objects made from this versatile and resilient man-made resin. A genial enthusiast, the curator ... Read more

Do you remember polio? Perhaps you don’t, but when I was growing up there were children who wore callipers (metal contraptions bolted to their leg below the knee) at my school or limped along wearing an awful tall shoe. Joan London has chosen child polio victims as her subject for this beautiful, tender and gently moving novel set in The Golden Age, a home for polio sufferers called in nineteen... Read more

This anticipated debut has already been sold into twenty one countries and seems destined to be one of this year’s big favourites. It’s a truly original and charming story originating in the author’s own tragic loss at the early death of her mother. She’s translated her own grief into a fantasy fable that asks big existential questions with a very light touch. When seven... Read more

Some writers are happy to write the same book over and over. They find a successful formula and stick to it. Paddy O’Reilly is not one of those writers. This book could not be more different from The Fine Colour of Rust, her deliciously humorous rural anti-romance. Except for one thing: she does one-off, out-of-the-box, quirky characters to a T. The trio at the centre of The Wonders would, in t... Read more

In a bold contemporary reworking of a classic Persian epic tale , this is the story of Zal, a boy raised among birds who meets Silber, a magician who wants to pull off the greatest trick in the history of the world. Zal also falls in not-quite-love love with Asiya an anorexic Cassandra-like photographer ( and her humungously large sister Willa). As you can tell from this schematic synopsis, you... Read more

Robert Dessaix knows his readers better than almost any other writer in Australia. He has met many of them personally at festivals over many years after developing an intense intimacy with them as a radio broadcaster. He has groupies who find him so captivating that I have heard them say after his public appearances than they’d like to pop him in their pocket and take him home. But Robert is no... Read more