Michael Shirrefs

President Danilo Türk and the Iconotheca Valvasoriana

In this interview for Artworks, Michael Shirrefs is speaking to the President of Slovenia, Dr Danilo Türk, about his Country’s extraordinary gift of an exceptional set of books to the State Library of Victoria—called the Iconotheca Valvasoriana.

Truganini : Bushranger

One of the most familiar names in the story of Australian colonisation is that of the Tasmanian Aboriginal woman ‘Truganini’. But for most people the story begins and ends with a single, very famous photo, along with a label describing her simply as the last of the full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines. This is a story that changes our whole understanding of this remarkable woman.

A Girl Made of Dust

Nathalie Abi-Ezzi spent the first eleven years of her life in a war-torn Lebanon, before her family moved to England in 1983. It’s these early years of her life that provide the impetus for her novel A Girl Made of Dust.

Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds—a novel by Gregory Day

In Gregory’s latest novel, Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds, the town of Mangowak has become a canvas on which he paints a large tale of small-town characters and all the undercurrents of their passions and fears. It’s a world where the threads of the past stitch together the lives of the present. And in this story, it’s through the characters of Ron McCoy and his mother Min that the community finds its social glue.

ZZ Packer—Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

The moving voice of American short-story writer ZZ Packer, whose understated observations of human nature have the power to get under a reader’s radar.

Shantaram

On Books & Writing this week, Shantaram—an epic novel, based on what happened when Gregory David Roberts found that ‘doing time’ for armed robbery was too much. He fled Australia, fell into the arms of India and began a vast journey of body and soul.