News & Blog
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
In a story written by Schiller, a young acolyte sneaks into the temple and steals a peak beneath the veil of the Goddess Isis. He falls down dead. What was hidden behind the veil? Something beyond time and space, something very dangerous…ourselves, or rather, what we were in past lives. In my latest novel I play with the concepts of time, space, life, death and even reincarnation. Like...
The Roman God, Janus, is depicted with two faces staring in opposite directions: one face looking into the past and the other into the future. The past can tell us a lot about who we are and what we will one day create, or do. That’s why I find it essential to retrace the steps that led me to a new novel and in so doing the fourth key to writing The Sixth Key is closely linked to my love...
The Third Key to writing The Sixth Key has to do with the fact that some people belong to their time and others do not. What do I mean by this? Like Otto Rahn, my protagonist, I realised at an early age that I didn’t belong to the Australia of the 1970’s but to the America and Europe of the 1930’s and 40’s. I didn’t fit in at all. While my friends were listening...
I’m often asked how long it takes to write a book and I have to restrain myself from answering, ‘How long is a piece of string?’ There is so much more to a book than those hours that a writer sits plying the craft in glorious abandon. But I’m not talking about those nights one can’t sleep because a particular plot line isn’t working, or a character just isn’t developing. I’m talking about the...
My latest novel The Sixth Key is published and in bookstores and now, as I bask in the warm afterglow of past labours, I find myself turning philosophical. You see, its my habit to retrace my steps, to search beyond those numerous drafts, sleepless nights, moments of self doubt and, of course, the usual last minute panic, to find the impulse that led to the book: the epiphanic moment – the birth of...
On a beautiful sunny afternoon in Sydney, a couple of weeks ago, over one hundred little girls and almost as many accompanying mums and dad waited on the wharf at Circular Quay to board the MV 2000 - for a book launch. It seemed a bit surreal at the time and I was pretty overwhelmed that all of those people were there to help me launch Alice-Miranda’s latest adventure Alice-Miranda At Sea. It was...
I have dawdled away the best years of my life in bookshops. As a boy there were pinball arcades and bowling alleys and milk bars; but always at some stage I would slip away from the gang and end up at the bookshop. The owner took pity on me let me malinger and browse. He had seen a few other bookworms similarly entranced by the endless worlds on his shelves. A good bookshop is as large and...
While doing publicity for a book you will run down some surprising conversational cul-de-sacs. (Culs-de-sac?) Pepsi Bears is a collection of short stories that, seemingly, has an animal theme. Making me come off, as one reviewer said, as a modern-day Aesop. Really, the animals in the book gathered by accident as much as design. But interviewers, who are flighty, suggestible beasts at the best...
I’ve never taken a writing course, so I don’t know if they work. I don’t know if writing can be taught. Maybe the many degrees and certificates on offer amount to an opportunist scam, like the stores selling picks and shovels to people on the way to the gold rush. Or maybe writing 101 is a legitimate industry that grew on the dream many people have to write. Were the people who did a course...
Writing fiction allows you a certain grace that writing opinion doesn’t. Since Pepsi Bears was published this month I’ve been compared to Jonathan Swift, Roald Dahl and Peter Carey. Critics and bloggers have said a great many nice things. But I also write opinion pieces and articles for newspapers and websites. In the comment trails the audience splits into warring factions and I am either...
