UWAP publishing officer Charlotte Guest discusses Perth: A Guide for the Curious with The West Australian’s Literary Editor, Will Yeoman. Watch the video here.
The West Book Club: The Life & Death of Sophie Stark & The Magus
PWF program manager Katherine Dorrington discusses Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark and John Fowles’s The Magus with the West Australian’s Literary Editor, Will Yeoman. Watch the video here.
John Kinsella and the art of poetry
“Poetry is a medium of change and alternative ways of seeing. I can never waken to a day without an awareness that damage is being done somewhere and that I have a responsibility to articulate responses to that damage.” Read the full story here.
Review: 20th Biennale of Sydney
Sydney Opera House. Picture: Will Yeoman
To explore the 20th Biennale of Sydney at any level — as connoisseur, as sight-seer, as flaneur — is to experience that dreamlike margin between reality and surreality in all its beauty and terror through the agency of art and some of the city’s most atmospheric sites. This year Artistic Director Stephanie Rosenthal has taken as her theme “The future’s already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”. Watch the video and read the story here.
The West Book Club: Belowsky performs Stay Greasy Baby!
Stevie Belowsky. Spoken Word Artist. Pop Poet. Playwright. Stand-up comedian. And now, with the publication of the extraordinary Stay Greasy Baby, memoirist. It’s no wonder Creation Records’ Alan McGee describes him as “a force of nature”. See the video and read the story here.
Interview: Wendy Whiteley & The Secret Garden
Wendy Whiteley in her Lavender Bay home. Picture: Jason Busch
Brett and Wendy Whiteley. They were Australia’s first superstar artistic couple, returning to Sydney in a blaze of glory after 10 years in Europe and Swinging Sixties London and New York, where they counted Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix among their friends. Back home, Brett would spend the next 20 years turning out masterpiece after masterpiece from the Whiteleys’ Lavender Bay home. Then it all started to fall apart… read the full story at The West Australian here
Book Review: Happiness (Martin Harrison)
“The Anglo-Australian poet Martin Harrison died in 2014 at the age of 65. He left us many compasses with which to navigate this dark world and wide, but two may suffice for this, his posthumous poetry collection, Happiness.” Read the full review at The West Australian here
Concert Review: Judas Maccabaeus (St. George’s Cathedral Consort)
“The final blazing chorus ‘Rejoice, O Judah’ with its refulgent ‘Hallelujah! Amen’ seemed, thanks to Nolan’s overarching conception, like some kind of angelic peroration of all that had gone before.”
Read the full review at the Australian Book Review Arts Update here
Concert Review: Reflection (Tura New Music)
“One of the more ridiculous observations you hear about some contemporary classical music is: ‘It’s too abstract’. Well, sorry, but all music is abstract. What people really mean when they that is: ‘I only like what I know’. The genius of this superb final concert in Tura New Music’s Reflection tour, which over three weeks had embraced 11 localities in WA’s top end from Kununurra to Broome to Newman before coming to rest at UWA’s Octagon Theatre, was how it used this tension between the known and the unknown to such moving and meaningful effect.”
Read the full review at The West Australian here
Book Review: Feet to the Stars and other stories (Susan Midalia)
“Like the best short stories, The Hook is both delicate and profound, setting individuals and their personal narratives adrift in the tumultuous ocean of a history that is continually being rewritten. And like the other stories in a collection thronging with different voices, different perspectives, different agonies — the title story and Oranges especially stand out for the precocious wisdom of their teenage protagonists — it creates a space for change simply to happen.”
Read the full review at The West Australian here
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