English at UTAS

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!

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

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

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

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

Teachers notes for a book called Floof which lists cats and irony as its two themes

There are only seven types of stories, and only two themes

Calling all First Nations Australian authors!

I'm taking pitches for Bundyi Publishing, either in person in Hobart, 22 and 23 August, or online.

I'd love to hear from those writing romance but happy to hear any commerical fiction ideas & non-fiction.

willorganise.eventsair.com/2025-romance...

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...

Cover of a book entitled “from the wreck” by Jane Rawson. Cover is quite badass - dark blue, with a pinkish giant octopus and its tentacles emerging from the Cover.

Have just finished Jane Rawson‘s splendidly odd “From the Wreck”. It’s one of those books that’s a bit tricky to describe, a key feature is that one of the central characters is a shapeshifting alien refugee who often takes the form of an octopus, which makes perfect sense under the circumstances 🐙

My Heart at Evening | Konrad Muller

The launch of a new Tasmanian publisher (Evercreech Editions) and a new Tasmanian novel (My Heart at Evening, by Konrad Muller), on August 7 at Fullers. Launched by Geordie Williamson, Adam Ouston and Richard Flanagan. www.fullersbookshop.com.au/event/my-hea...

My Heart at Evening | Konrad Muller

The launch of a new Tasmanian publisher (Evercreech Editions) and a new Tasmanian novel (My Heart at Evening, by Konrad Muller), on August 7 at Fullers. Launched by Geordie Williamson, Adam Ouston and Richard Flanagan. www.fullersbookshop.com.au/event/my-hea...

Repeal Job-Ready Graduates Policy Now: Restoring Equity in Higher Education - Online petition We sign this petition in solidarity with those who signed the Open Letter to the Prime Minister on 28 July 2025 (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jul/28/open-letter-to-australian-govern...

Repeal the “inequitable, “pernicious,” and “perverse" Jobs Ready Graduate Policy! openpetition.org/!repealjrg

Island magazine - Nature Writing Prize We are delighted to present our inaugural NATURE WRITING PRIZE, run in partnership with Fullers Bookshop Hobart and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy.  The prize will be judged ‘blind’, which means the j...

For those who are into new Australian nature writing prizes, I'm judging this:

island.submittable.com/submit/02fa0...

Mystery, outback horror and a wandering protagonist propel Gail Jones’ The Name of the Sister The Name of the Sister begins in classic genre territory: a young woman is found stumbling down an outback road, without the power of speech and without an apparent identity.

Something I wrote on Gail Jones's latest theconversation.com/mystery-outb...

A female elephant seal asleep on her back in some grass, apparently smiling, with a shiny black rock about the size of avocado lying near her nose

Just a girl and her best rock 🪨

Polar bare An Australian Antarctic expedition researching melting ice shelves and ocean currents has found phytoplankton in the depths

Kath Kenny on an Australian Antarctic expedition: “On board are 60 researchers seeking to understand what is driving the melting ice and how glacial water is changing the ocean’s ecosystems.”

Participating in Dr Lucy Christopher's WritersBLOCK/ReadersBLOCK project tomorrow...

📖

... spending two undisturbed hours reading Tasmanian literature in a glass fronted block in Salamanca Square, Hobart, while a Tasmanian writes in the block alongside...

📝

...hope it's as idyllic as it sounds!

[Van Helsing pulling back Lucy's pale gums:] teeth, teeth-

Arthur: teeth, TEETH

Lucy: [pounding the window frame] TEETH, TEETH, TEETH

Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks Amazon brand will offer more than 100 artificial intelligence-generated voices in English and other languages

With more slop about to be poured into the world, I'd like to celebrate the 2012 audiobook of Dracula, somehow featuring both Alan Cumming and Tim Curry, but also actors who thrived and built careers in audiobooks, like Katherine Kellgren and Simon Vance www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Is there ANYONE who doesn't like having jokes explained to them?

Thanks to the Honours students @utasenglish.bsky.social who are enjoying the extended, twelve week version...

One of my most anticipated #books of the year has arrived, all the way from Australia. If you’ve not read Jane Rawson yet, you should.

Can we recreate a lost world? In Tasmania, anything could happen The thylacine might walk again. Or Lake Pedder might rise again. The possibility of ecological restoration in the island state plays into the appeal of going back in time

Can we recreate a lost world? In Tasmania, anything could happen - by the brilliant Jane Rawson

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A long cloud over a calm beach It's an hour before sunset so the shadows are getting long and the light is mellowing. The sand is golden, the water is greying blue, and the sky is a hundred shades of blue. If you really peered, you'd see two people standing on a floating pontoon just off shore, moored there specifically for swimmers.

The kids grabbing the final gasp of summer see their chance as a ferry glides past. "Watch this!" one yells to the passengers as he flips off the jetty, into the water.

A quiet murmur of appreciation, everyone remembering their own youth.

A seagull watches it all from one leg, utterly unimpressed.

Of the Colonial Regime, or the Horrors of Slavery! Europeans who are not acquainted with this horrific system, who cannot even imagine it, you men of feeling, do not weep too soon over this tableau, these slight sketches of the Trade and its horrors! Do not exhaust your sensibility. Hold back your sighs and your tears: you have seen and heard nothing yet! Listen to my account of the colonial regime, and try and imagine, if you can, the monsters who could enact cruelties of this order. Colonists, those of you who still draw breath, listen to me! I shall awaken the remains of the numerous victims you thrust into the grave, and borrow their voices so that I might unveil your foul deeds. I shall exhume those poor wretches you buried alive. I shall consult the shades of the dead, those unfortunate compatriots of mine you threw alive into a fiery furnace; those you ordered be put on a spit, roasted, impaled, or subjected to a thousand other forms of torture invented by the powers of hell! In tracing the outline of these horrors, I do not hope to soften your hearts, for, as we know only too well, those hearts are more hardened than bronze and steel. We know that your depraved souls are inaccessible to remorse and pity; we are familiar with your odious and ruthless character, as inflexible in your views as in your acts of vengeance; we know that you will never change. If, on this score, I have nothing to hope from you, I can at the very least make you tremble by unveiling your misdeeds and recording your names on these pages, so that they might be held in abhorrence by your contemporaries and by generations to come.

A little Haitian anticolonialism from Baron de Vastey works very nicely in a Gothic literature course 👍

kunanyi in the morning

Another awful day in Hobart coming up.

WINNERS ANNOUNCED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2025
 
🏆 Prize for Poetry: Gawimarra: Gathering, Jeanine Leane
 
Congratulations to Jeanine Leane, on being awarded the VPLA Prize for Poetry for your work Gawimarra: Gathering. #wheelercentre #vplas

!!

Spent the morning with honours students @utasenglish.bsky.social talking about 'The Comedy of Errors' and the works of @oldfortunatus.bsky.social and Northrop Frye.

An unalloyed pleasure in itself, and also a chance to reflect on that time The X-Men met Frye and chatted about Blake's poetry...

“Being the 2024 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence enhanced my visibility and afforded me so many opportunities,” said @genni.bsky.social who took the position last year.

A man and woman in their bestockinged Georgian finery are reading Matthew Lewis's The Monk and looking scandalised, sitting close together on a toilet bench, while a suss guy leers at them through a high window

Early 19thC sickos meme: reading The Monk in the water closet