Dr Fergus Edwards

‘A drug that’s very safe and healthy‘: what ultrarunners can teach us about life | Sean Ingle Caitriona Jennings ran 100 miles in just over 12 hours and wants other women to follow her example – ‘it’s not actually that difficult’

Finn: Is this the appeal of ultrarunning? To push ourselves to a place where we stand face to face with the devil, but then to rise up to overcome it?

Jennings: laughs, calls it an interesting theory. For her there is something else.

Only Caitriona is right...

www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/n...

Grim, funny and unremitting, Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot is a book attuned to dark times The Rot is haunted by complicity, and haunting in its insistence on remembering every betrayal.

Tom Ford on Evelyn Araluen's new book The Rot

theconversation.com/grim-funny-a...

A deep red paperback edition of The Rot on a grey tablecloth.

Yep, you're all getting 'The Rot' by @evelynaraluen.bsky.social for Christmas and there *will* be a test...

🤮

Lorraine Daston · Kaboom! Slow-Motion Extinction Historians who address such topics as extinction, which straddle the history of humans and of the Earth, face the...

Harms done to people of the palawa and pakana when recognising genocide is elided with an assumed extinction are sensitively introduced in @lrb.co.uk

But: part of that harm is forgetting lutrawita and the palawa and pakana, and only using Tasmania and Tasmanians...

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

News report on our Read, Write, Publish day yesterday!

Really enjoyed watching the third year show from @utas.edu.au's Theatre & Performance students this afternoon...

🎭

...thankyou Adrian, Anna, Autumn, Brooke, Laree, and Megan, and everyone involved!

And we're down to the final runner!

🇦🇺 Phil Gore

He starts loop 114 alone and looking SO FRESH - if he makes it back within an hour he wins - but as last person standing he won't have a shot at his world record...

🇧🇪 Awesome Ivo Steyart finishes loop 113 and "refuses to continue"

#bigdogultra

And we're down to the final two!

🇦🇺 Phil Gore
🇧🇪 Ivo Steyart

After 112 continuous loops - 4 days and 16 hours, 751.027km - they're out on loop 113...!

🇺🇸 Harvey Lewis timed out after a fantastic 111 loops to place third (not finish third: technically no-one ever finishes a backyard...)

#bigdogultra

It's 🇬🇧 Sarah Perry's world record 🥳...

... but maybe don't tell her?

She's got a shot at the whole thing: 11 set out on loop 93, the world record is 119...

#bigdogultra

(96 'yards' will be 96 hours and 400miles: 4 days of 4.167miles every single hour)

🇺🇸 Megan Eckhert made an awesome 92 laps

They're just different delightful flavours 😀

The race isn't over, but the womens's world record has just gone...

🇬🇧 Sarah Perry
🇺🇸 Megan Eckart

... are both through 88 'yards' (590km) - one yard an hour, every hour - as it looks like 14 athletes are still standing at the #bigdogultra

🥳

Syllabus! A unit on home, empire, and the unheimlich. Texts from Victor Séjour, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Alice Perrin, Marcus Clarke, Rabindranath Tagore, Lettice Galbraith, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and more ...

Phenomenal 24hr Running World Championship yesterday

Two women beat the previous world record...
+ Australia's Holly Ranson 273.058km

...and the new world record holder:
+ Great Britain's Sarah Webster 277.559km

🥳

www.irunfar.com/great-britai...

Another so-called informed critic unwittingly revealing that they actually only ever watched the movie and have only now finally bothered to sit down and read the award winning twentieth century classic that is Gone With The Wind.

Travelling from Tasmania to see Indian Ink at the Hampstead Theatre in December!

(Conveniently can see family at the same time)

The @leslietravers.bsky.social staging will be unusually relevant for a Stoppard; neither the radically determined set of a Jumpers nor the freedom of a Rosencrantz...

Poster for READ, WRITE, PUBLISH: HOBART

Love writing? Curious about how to get published? Teaching creative writing? Come join a vibrant community of writers at Read, Write, Publish: Hobart on Monday 27th October! www.facebook.com/share/19hBVu... @utas.edu.au

Here are the bookies’ odds for the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next week, on Thursday, October 9. As always, to prepare myself (emotionally, I guess?), I consulted the UK betting site NicerOdds (nicer than w…

The (idiosyncratic) Nobel Prize for Literature is announced tomorrow

One Australian has the best the odds (Gerald Murnane), another (Alexis Wright) is seen as a genuine possibility

(FWIW, if it's Tom Stoppard I'm here for all your media inquiries... 🤓)

lithub.com/here-are-the...

2nd at the Coastal Pathway 64km (5h12)

(and a 50km PB (4h) en route)

🥳

Wonderful crew, good running weather, lovely day out all round

Now for a nap and all the food

Very kind, thankyou!

Running the first Coastal Pathway 64km Ultra on Sunday

🏃‍♂️

Latrobe -> Ulverstone -> Latrobe

Hoping for dry(ish) and still(ish)

🌦️

As always, it will be hardest on the (wonderful) crew...😬

Looking forward to chatting about Kate Kruimink's novel 'Heartsease' with @helenshield.bsky.social on ABC Hobart, tonight at 21:15

2025 Tasmanian Premier's Prize for Fiction Winner, with, among other things, a fair bit of middle-class Hobart in it...

‘You can be an academic badass and a track goddess’ – GB sprinter Amy Hunt revels in shock 200m silver Hunt powers from sixth to second with the kind of fearless attitude that helped her come back from a quadriceps rupture

"You can be an academic badass and a track goddess"

BA in English (Cam) *and* 200m silver medallist (22.14s) at the World Athletics Championships

If you need a sporting role model, you could do a lot worse than Amy Hunt...

www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/s...

The Play Podcast - 101 - The 101 Greatest Plays

This was a joy to listen to - intelligent, humble, informed, and, unexpectedly, intensely moving. I cannot imagine a better case being made for King Lear.

Thankyou Douglas Schatz, Mark Lawson, and Michael Billington

🎭

open.spotify.com/episode/4od4...

Written by @catrionamp.bsky.social

Meanjin's 'financial' shutdown doesn't add up Melbourne University reported a $273 million surplus in 2024 on an operating income of $3.2 billion. It is against these figures that the 'purely financial decision' to close Meanjin has raised eyebro...

Teaching HEN319: Literary Cultures @utasenglish.bsky.social, and the treatment of Meanjin is an obscene paragon of what we're studying

www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/08/m...

Bastards! | Sydney Review of Books From economic rationalism to libertarianism, neoliberalism appears under many guises. Reviewing Quinn Slobodian’s new book on neoliberal thought, James Ley shows that what its founders share with latt...

Grateful for @jamesley's most recent SRB piece. The key (the call to arms is elsewhere):

Neo-liberalism's "transference of the emancipatory language of rights and freedoms to capital makes the rights and freedoms of actual people secondary and conditional."

sydneyreviewofbooks.com/reviews/bast...

Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

Enjoyed Diana Souhami chatting Bryher, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, and alternative titles for her book:

'No Modernism Without Women Who Had Special Relationships With Other Women That They May Not Have Known How To Define'

or

'Lesbians Galore!'

open.spotify.com/episode/4qF7...

Cozy fan tutte

Evenings - ABC listen Learn how Fremantle in Western Australia is feeling with the Spirit of Tasmania IV on its four-day stopover and Arianne Struik explains what EMDR therapy is and how it is being used in the North West ...

A pleasure to chat with @helenshield.bsky.social about Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud' - historical fiction that begins with a floor of a house collapsing under the weight of its books.

📚📚📚📚📚

Arguably a consummation devoutly to be wished...

Here, from 2:27:30

www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...