I’ve heard people say that doing a PhD can permanently kill your interest in the topic of your study. Not for me. I had the good fortune to pick a topic where there’s never a dull moment: overseas commercial surrogacy. Six months after I started my PhD, two surrogacy scandals broke in Thailand; one involving abandoned twin Baby Gammy, the other a Japanese businessman alleged to have fathered 19 children by Thai surrogates. This was followed by news of another twin born through surrogacy abandoned by his Australian parents in India. More recently, there was the arrest in Cambodia of… [Read more]

I recently returned from the Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) in India. The festival was full of writers I knew and loved, and writers I didn’t know whose work I chanced upon. Here are just a few of the treasures from GALF 2016 that would have been hard to find in Australia. – I encountered the work of Abeer Y. Hoque for the first time at GALF when I bought her memoir Olive Witch (2016), and her collection of short stories The Lovers and the Leavers (2014). Olive Witch is the story of Hoque’s many journeys, between Nigeria, Bangladesh,… [Read more]

I recently finished reading Never Never by James Patterson and Candice Fox. Never Never is a large, heavy paperback, wrapped in the vibrant hues that signal the Australian desert as well as the thriller genre. The taglines on the book jump out at me: my favourite one promises that ‘the pages turn themselves’. Patterson, the world’s highest earning author last year, is an entrepreneurial force in the publishing industry and Fox is a multi-award-winning Australian crime author, so Never Never is a fascinating collaboration for people interested in contemporary Australian crime writing. The novel’s protagonist is the spiky, sweary Detective… [Read more]

The box of books I pack to take to the beach for our three-week summer camping trip is ambitious to say the least. It is ambitious in terms of time (and maybe content); the summers where I devoured up to twenty novels during our beachside hiatus are long gone. These days, reading time is snatched in precarious two-minute lots when one of the other parents has eyes on the kids in the water, or is attempted in the last drifting minutes before I give in to ocean-lulled sleep. I pack for myself, for my family, and for the friends who… [Read more]

By Frank Moorhouse What did the winners of the Vogel Literary Prize for young writers in last three years wish for from their writing talent? What happened to those who won it 15 years back and to those who won it 30 years back? The Vogel Literary Award is a manuscript prize open to writers under 35 years of age which includes publication by Allen and Unwin and $20,000 prize money. It is the only Australian prize for an unpublished work. The award was initiated in 1979 by Niels Stevns, founder of the company which makes Vogel bread, and is a… [Read more]

Tim Winton, 57, won the Vogel in 1981 when he was 24, for his book An Open Swimmer. Tim, did you set out to be a fiction writer in the literary tradition before or after the Vogel? ‘I was determined to be a literary novelist, and a professional writer, well before that.  This was first and always my only idea of a working life – it’s all I ever wanted to do.’ So you did wish to write full time? ‘Yes, of course.  Right from the get-go. I told myself I’d do it part-time if forced, but to my mind… [Read more]

Kate Grenville, now 67, won the Vogel in 1984 for her novel Lillian’s Story. ‘Hi Frank, I’m in promotion mode for this strange little book I’ve just done about fragrance [The Case against Fragrance] – it’s surprising all of us how much interest there is about it, so I’m doing a lot of yacking about it. Some very hasty answers to your questions.’ Did you set out to be a fiction writer in the literary tradition before or after the Vogel? ‘I had no sense of myself as a writer of any kind, in any tradition, before the Vogel.  I just… [Read more]