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Winner of the 2014 Davitt Award for Best True Crime Book and the 2014 William Hill Sports Book of the Year ‘The Pies beat the Saints and the city of Melbourne was still cloaked in black and white crepe paper when the rumour of a pack rape by celebrating footballers began to surface ... And so, as police were confiscating bedsheets from a townhouse in South Melbourne, the trial by media began.’ What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks, or games: night games with women. Sometimes these involve consensual sex, sometimes not, and often the lines are blurred. In Night Games, Anna Krien follows the rape trial of an Australian Rules football...
Winner, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2011 Winner, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2011 For many years, the Tasmanian wilderness has been the site of a fierce struggle. At stake is the future of old-growth forests. Loggers and police face off with protesters deep in the forest, while savage political games are played in the courts and parliaments. In Into the Woods, Anna Krien, armed with a notebook, a sleeping bag and a rusty sedan, ventures behind the battlelines to see what it is like to risk everything for a cause. She speaks to ferals and premiers, sawmillers and whistle-blowers. She investigates personalities and convictions, methods and motives. This is a book about a company that wanted its way and the resistance that eventually forced it to change. Updated with a new afterword, Into the Woods is intimate, intrepid reporting by a fearless new voice. ‘Anna Krien’s intimate, urgent book pulsates with life and truth.’ — Chloe Hooper ‘Anna Krien is Australia’s young, female Hunter S. Thompson.’ — Amanda Lohrey
Longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2020 'A novelist for our times' Anna Funder, author of Stasiland In this brilliant novel of fear and sacrifice, trauma and survival, four characters' lives intertwine across time and place. Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD. A decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father's dementia and family silences that may never be addressed, begins to test boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey's tyranny and heal the wounds inflicted by it. Act of Grace is a meditation on inheritance: the damage that one generation bestows upon the next, and the potential for transformation. It is a searing, powerful and utterly original work by an exceptional Australian writer.
‘On a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 a.m. I'm told this is one of Alice Springs' three notorious 'animal bars' … As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. Am I lost? he wants to know. In a way, I am. I don't want a beer. It's 10 a.m., for Chrissake. ’ In Booze Territory, Anna Krien takes a clear-eyed look at Indigenous binge-drinking – who does it, why, and what it means. She visits bars brimming with morning drinkers and investigates alcoholic after-effects ranging from extreme violence to extraordinarily high rates of cirrhosis of the liver. This is an essay which never fails to see the human dimension of an intractable problem and shine a light on its deep causes.
Australia — and the world — is changing. On the Great Barrier Reef corals bleach white, across the inland farmers struggle with declining rainfall, birds and insects disappear from our gardens and plastic waste chokes our shores. The 2019–20 summer saw bushfires ravage the country like never before and young and old alike are rightly anxious. Human activity is transforming the places we live in and love. In this extraordinarily powerful and moving book, some of Australia's best-known writers and thinkers — as well as ecologists, walkers, farmers, historians, ornithologists, artists and community activists — come together to reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecologica...
"Highly recommended" Sunday Times "Utterly captivating" Woman and Home "Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021 "Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times "Sparse and precise" Telegraph "Beautifully direct and lucid prose . . . fierce intelligence" Melbourne Age & Sydney Morning Herald "A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European "An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" Observer Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until sh...
'She is a feminist icon, one of our most consequential authors and a unique individual. But perhaps we should start with something she is not: Robyn Davidson does not like to call herself a writer, or at least not a Writer.' Robyn Davidson, author of the classic memoir Tracks, has led a remarkable life of writing and nomadic travel. In this bracing, erudite essay, acclaimed critic and journalist Richard Cooke explores Davidson's relationship with place and freedom, and her singular presence in Australian letters. In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
Today it is often said that we live in a 'rape culture'. Panicked headlines tell us that rape is on the increase and that the police are failing to deal with it. Our courts are said to be incapable of delivering justice in rape cases, with the rate of convictions remaining consistently low. Sexism and misogyny in wider society have created a culture in which rape is pervasive, under-reported and often ignored by an uncaring public. But these claims are built on myths and misunderstandings. This book argues that the belief in a 'rape culture' is seriously distorting our discussion of sexual violence. It explains how the laws around rape have expanded significantly in recent decades, giving the state a far greater say in the most intimate areas of our lives. The drive to prosecute more and more people has damaging implications for our legal rights and basic freedoms - and our ability to live intimately with one another. If we are to have a serious discussion about rape, it's time to dispel the dangerous myth of rape culture.
On the 15th day of December in the year of our Lord 1664, a great light bloomed in the dark sky and crept slowly and silently across the blackness: a comet. Every evening afterwards, though snow lay on the ground and the air bit with frost, men across the land threw open their windows and went out of their doors in cloaks and mufflers to gaze at the heavens, necks stretched up, hands shielding eyes, crooking long fingers to trace the burning thing that flamed across the night, while dogs moaned in their kennels and wise women chanted incantations against bright malignant spirits. Born on the night of an ill-auguring comet just before Charles II's Restoration, Ursula Flight has a difficult future written in the stars. Against the custom of the age she begins an education with her father, who fosters in her a love of reading, writing and astrology. Following a surprising meeting with an actress, Ursula's dreams turn to the theatre and thus begins her quest to become a playwright despite scoundrels, bounders, bad luck and heartbreak. A vivid, passionate and gutsy tale of a most unusual girl in a world far away.