Books

Fiction

Sweeney and the Bicycles

Written with warmth and humour, this captivatingly original novel opens us up to an intimate world of marvellous characters and unexpected developments. Trauma is balanced by the joys and weirdness of everyday life. Friendship and family just may be found in the unlikeliest of places.

Fiction

The Fifth Season

Set in a small coastal town, The Fifth Season is a haunting and intriguing tale about a writer who is pre-occupied with the phenomenon of found people, a mural artist with a missing sister, and an old book that bears a striking resemblance to real life events…

The Fifth Season was long listed for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Fiction

The Returns

A story about the eccentricities, failings and small triumphs that humans are capable of, a novel that pokes fun at literary and artistic pretensions, while celebrating the expansiveness of art, kindness and friendship…

The Returns was a finalist in the 2020 Miles Franklin Award, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Prize.

Fiction

Waiting

A story of two odd couples in prose as marvellously idiosyncratic as its characters…

Waiting was shortlisted for the 2016 Miles Franklin Award, the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Prize and the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award.

Poetry

Alterworld

When Peter Porter noted the brilliance of Philip Salom’s poems and said they were unlike anything in Australian poetry, he was referring to Sky Poems (1987), an ironic otherworld of the twentieth century and the first book of the Alterworld trilogy. Salom later added The Well Mouth (2005), an underworld of limbo and stopped-life to counter Sky Poems’ endless possibilities. Now the accidental realities of Alterworld reach into the twenty-first century but remain haunted by Salom’s ambiguous visions of life and death. 

Poetry

Keepers

Keepers is highly entertaining and serious; there are brilliant flashes and reflections, ironic observations and a lot of humour. The poems form stories and portraits of recognisable and unrecognisable people who teach and study in a School of Arts. The ironic observations of Fish, flâneur and Go player, form a narrative underlying the poems.

Poetry

The Keeper of Fish

Alan Fish was writing poetry before his life went dark. He let it collect like a tank of rain-water. His subject matter? Love and death. His poetry is deeply haunted and lyrical in its privacy but also ironically observant and public. Alan Fish left his basement in the Print Room, left his Keepers behind him and struck out on his own.

Poetry

Keeping Carter

A new poet on the block, M A Carter is uncaring of the niceties and the pat expressions of much poetry within the status quo. Instead, Carter is mordant, immoderate, opinionated and likely to offend. He writes in a style that is distinctly musical and even lyrical but his observations stray wildly and eccentrically from the expected.