InaGuddle
About books of all kinds - random musings by Elizabeth Robinson
Sunday 21 April 2024
Hard No
Wednesday 10 April 2024
International Booker Prize Shortlist 2024
The International Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist has been announced with six titles of fiction translated into English, from a longlist of thirteen.
The shortlist is as follows:
- Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
- Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
- The Details by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
- Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae)
- What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
- Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)
Reading is a necessary enlargement of human experience. Why be confined to one perspective, one life? Novels carry us to places where we might never set foot and connect us with new sensations and memories. Our shortlist shows us lives lived against the backdrop of history or, more precisely, interweaves the intimate and the political in radically original ways. These books bear the weight of the past while at the same time engaging with current realities of racism and oppression, global violence and ecological disaster. Some seem altogether timeless in their careful and vivid accounts of the dynamics of family, love and heartbreak, trauma and grief.
The prize awards £25,000 to the author and £25,000 to the translator, in recognition of the essential work of translators in bringing fiction to a wider audience. I am keen to read more translated fiction, and some of the titles on this shortlist sound interesting if I can track them down.
The winner will be announced on 21 May 2024.
Thursday 4 April 2024
Stella Prize Shortlist 2024
The 2024 Stella Prize Shortlist has been announced! The twelve nominees have been whittled down to six finalists in the running for this important literary award.
The 2024 shortlist is as follows:- Katia Ariel - The Swift Dark Tide
- Katherine Baron - Body Friend
- Emily O'Grady - Feast
- Sanya Rushdi - Hospital
- Hayley Singer - Abandon Every Hope
- Alexis Wright - Praiseworthy
“All of life and death is here in these pages: illness, madness, love, sex, slaughter, parenthood, sovereignty, climate, Country. But none of the books on this shortlist tell readers what to think. They do not hector, lecture or preach. Rather, they open spaces for doubt and self-examination; for disagreement and camaraderie; for rage, absurdity and exultation; for the grotesque and the gorgeous. They invite us in. And they trust us to make up our own minds. This is the quality that distinguished them in the judging room: their mighty generosity.”
Monday 1 April 2024
Birdsong
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) opens with the famous line 'happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. I thought of this line as I read Anne Enright's The Wren, The Wren (2023), the story of a family and the ways in which complex relationships have intergenerational impacts.
Nell McDaragh is the grand-daughter of a famous Irish poet, Phil McDaragh, whom she never knew. At age 22 she leaves home to become a writer for a travel blog and starts a relationship with a controlling man who is not the loving boyfriend she seeks.
Nell's relationship with her mother, Carmel, is fraught and layered with intergenerational trauma. The mother-daughter pair love each other fiercely, but often in unhealthy ways. Carmel has difficulty connecting with people, having been abandoned by her father Phil, who left his terminally ill wife and young family. She also struggles to reconcile a man who writes such beautiful verse with his personal behaviour. One such verse, 'the wren, the wren' he wrote for Carmel, and she holds on to this as proof of his love.
Carmel awaits a visit from Nell and watches an old video of her father being interviewed. With his Irish charm, Phil recounts that his wife 'got sick, unfortunately, and the marriage did not survive'. Carmel fumes as the reason for the marriage failure was her father's wandering eye and his inability to take responsibility for his own actions. Phil died years ago, but his shadow looms large. Carmel's sister Imelda sees him quite differently, forging a wedge between the women.
Enright tells the story in alternating narratives between Carmel and Nell, with Phil's poems scattered throughout the novel. As I read, I listened to the audiobook version where Enright performed Carmel to perfection. I also enjoyed Owen Roe's Phil and Aoife Duffin voicing Nell. I had the pleasure of seeing Enright at the All About Women festival last month, where she read passages from the book, and signed a copy of the book for me.Enright's prose is magnificent. She infuses darkness with humour, and creates realistic, fallible humans. Birds recur throughout the novel, as Nell recalls their song, and travels to Australia and New Zealand where she wonders at the exotic birds. Nature is also a theme of many of Phil's poems. The inclusion of this verse was a brilliant way to contrast Phil's outward appearance with the reality of those who knew him.
I absolutely loved The Wren, The Wren - an early contender for my favourite read of 2024. Absolutely brilliant!
The Wren, the Wren has been longlisted for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction. Enright is the author of seven novels including the Booker Prize winning The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2016) which was previously shortlisted for the Women's Prize. I really must read more of her novels!
Sunday 31 March 2024
Behind the Headlines
Some of my favourite novels are written by journalists, who turn the skills they honed investigating real events to spin a terrific yarn. Geraldine Brooks infuses her novels with meticulously researched detail. Annie Proulx deeply understands human nature. Chris Hammer understands police procedurals. Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, George Orwell and others have all forged successful careers both in journalism and as novelists.
Investigative reporter Louise Milligan has turned her attention to fiction in her debut novel, Pheasants Nest (2024). The story centres around Kate Delaney, a dynamic journalist who becomes a news story when she goes missing, presumed kidnapped. Her lawyer boyfriend, Liam Carroll, and best friend, fashion writer Sylvia Estrellita, contact the police. They don't hold out much hope, so hit the road themselves looking for clues.Meanwhile, Kate is in the back of a car, bound and gagged, racing down the Hume Highway with a man only referred to as The Guy. Kate is in pain from his assault on her, and terrified by the prospects of what might happen to her. She has attended enough courtrooms to know what sort of fate might await her. Will her kidnapper make a mistake? Will her boyfriend find her? Will the police solve the crime?
This is a quick-paced page turner and I read this novel in a few hours. There were aspects of it that I didn't like - too much backstory about various characters, an impossibly fabulous central character who is just the right kind of victim, and the way Milligan always used people's full names. However, Pheasants Nest is an impressive debut novel and I am glad Milligan made the leap into fiction.
My review of Louise Milligan's Witness (2020) is available on this blog.
Friday 29 March 2024
Salvation
A woman leaves her life in Sydney behind for a short break at a convent's guest house on the Monaro Plains in NSW. She is at loose ends, uncertain about her job and at the end of her marriage. While she is not religious, she observes the rituals performed by the nuns, attending their prayers and services. She is trying to find inner peace in a noisy world. When she leaves, she does not expect to return.
A few months later she is back to stay at the convent. She does not take vows or adopt the faith, but rather she performs silent service - cooking, cleaning and working in the yard. She lives a humble life among the sisters and becomes connected with nature in a way she could not have imagined when working at the Threatened Species Rescue Centre. For the most part, nothing much happens - just a slow, day-to-day pace of a life disconnected from the wider world.While they are largely protected from the COVID-19 pandemic in their remote location, the mouse plague that ran through New South Wales in 2021 is upon them. Our protagonist gets to work trying to protect what little the nuns have from being ravaged by mice. She chases, traps, and buries the mice and lies awake at night listening to them scurry in the walls.
Into the mix comes Helen Parry, an activist nun who has been forced to return to this convent for a short stay disrupting the rhythm and bringing forth memories of the protagonist's childhood when she was a school with Parry. Parry has brought with her the bones of a sister who died overseas, and the nuns keep vigil while they await permission to bury a member of their order.
Wood has crafted a compelling novel where the pace is slowed and the narrator is tested by these three incursions - the mice, the remains and Parry - into her solitude. Through her descriptive prose, Wood makes the most of even the smallest moments in the daily lives of these women. It is a story where seemingly nothing much happens and the reader is left wondering what the narrator is thinking. It is written in the style of a journal, jotting down what happens, a story told for no one but herself.
What I loved about the novel is that the narrator is respectful of the religious beliefs of the nuns, but is not compelled to join them. She exists outside their belief structure, but is welcomed regardless. I also love that Wood writes realistic women characters in their 50s, a demographic that deserves great novelists like Wood.
My reviews of other great novels by Charlotte Wood are available on this blog:- The Natural Way of Things (2015)
- The Weekend (2019)
Across 110th Street
Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (2021), set in the early 1960s in New York City, centres around Ray Carney, an African American salesman who seeks to run an honest furniture store in his community. Ray wants to distance himself from his past (his father was a local criminal) and be an upstanding member of society. With a pregnant wife and young child, Ray struggles to provide but is determined to be a good husband and father.
Ray's cousin Freddie runs with a dicey crew. Freddie tells Ray that gangster Miami Joe is planning to rob Hotel Theresa and wants Ray to fence the stolen items. Ray is not interested, but after the heist the thieves show up with a necklace they want Ray to sell. Things go badly in the aftermath and Ray gets dragged deeper into the criminal enterprise.Ray finds a balance between his legitimate work selling Ardent sofas and flipping stolen goods. Ray doesn't want to be shady, and tries to tell himself he isn't, even as he performs his dodgy side hustle. As his business takes off he is able to expand the store, hire more staff and move to a nicer apartment. But cousin Freddie has a proposition which brings Ray to the attention of influential and dangerous men.
During this period, Harlem was undergoing substantial change, and the novel culminates with the Harlem Riots of 1964. A white off-duty police officer shot and killed black teenager James Powell, in a scene all too common in America. The six days of riots that followed involved 4000 people and resulted in one death, 118 injured and over 400 arrests.
I really enjoy Whitehead's prose. He writes in a cinematic way which allows readers to visualise the action but also grounds the tale with a sense of place. Yet there were times I felt the story lost momentum - the middle third was a struggle to stay engaged, between thrilling Theresa job and fast-paced Van Wyck affair. While reading, I also listened to the audiobook brilliantly performed by Dion Graham who infused each character with unique, authentic voice. Graham got me through the awkward middle and kept me gripped until the end. I loved his narration so much I have looked out other books he has voiced.
Harlem Shuffle is the first instalment of a planned trilogy. In May 2023 I heard Whitehead speak at the Sydney Writers' Festival about Crook Manifesto (2023), the second book, and I was able to get both books signed by the author. My review of Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) is also available on this blog.
Thursday 28 March 2024
Women's Prize for Non Fiction Shortlist 2024
The shortlist of the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist has been announced, whittling the sixteen titles on the longlist down to a shortlist of six.
The 2024 shortlist is as follows:- Laura Cumming - Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
- Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
- Noreen Masud - A Flat Place
- Tiya Miles -All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- Madhumita Murgia - Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
- Safiya Sinclair - How to Say Babylon
Saturday 23 March 2024
Stella Prize Longlist 2024
The 2024 Stella Prize longlist has been released! The annual literary award celebrating women and non-binary writers of both fiction and non-fiction is named after Australian author Stella Miles Franklin.
Past winners include some of my favourite books on recent years:
On 4 March 2024, the longlist was revealed with 12 nominees. I have not read any of the titles, and many of the authors are unknown to me, so I look forward to exploring these books further.
The 2024 longlist is as follows:
Sunday 17 March 2024
All About Women 2024
I have not attended the All About Women festival since before the pandemic, but thought I would go this year as the line up looked great. I booked three sessions, leaving myself time to explore the scene down at the Sydney Opera House.
Here's how I spent my day, Sunday 10 March 2024, at All About Women.
Mary BeardAnne Enright
Irish author Anne Enright's latest novel, The Wren, The Wren, follows a mother and daughter impacted by brutality of family violence. It has just been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and I have been enjoying reading it.
This session, moderated by author Madeline Gray, began with Enright reading two passages. She chose one of Nell, the daughter, and another of Carmel, the mother, which perfectly captured their essence. Enright spoke about writing and how she finds her characters. She talked about how she likes her readers to make up their own minds about characters.
After this session I met Anne Enright and asked her to sign a copy of The Gathering for me, winner of the 2007 Booker Prize*. I told her it was a shame we could only get one signed, as I had The Wren, The Wren with me too. She did a quick shuffle of my books so I could get them both signed!
Anna Funder
Readers of this blog will know that I adore Anna Funder and love all of her work. Her latest book, Wifedom, is an intriguing look at George Orwell's wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Funder sat down with Jemma Birrell to discuss the book and how it came to be.All About Women has a wonderful lineup with some of my favourite thinkers speaking - Tara Moss, Jane Caro, Jan Fran, Jamila Rizvi, Grace Tame, Clementine Ford, Chanel Contos, Nakkiah Luis, Jess Hill, Brooke Boney, Bridie Jabour, and Sisonke Msimang. There were plenty of other sessions that I would have liked to have attended at the All About Women festival - including Yellowface with Rebecca F Kuang - but I found the festival schedule really tricky with the staggered session times that overlapped or had short breaks between. The Opera House is a lovely venue, but it is hard to navigate between the various rooms. I also found the Kinokuniya pop-up bookshop disappointing as there was no space to wander around and the queues were terrible.
Saturday 16 March 2024
Great American Novels
The Atlantic has just published a list of 'Great American Novels' naming 100 titles published in the past 100 years. I love a book list and was intrigued by this list which The Atlantic claims 'represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight is, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and more alive than we were before.' Let's check out this exciting list )novels in bold I have read, linked where there is a review on this blog):
- F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Theodore Dreiser - An American Tragedy (1925)
- Gertrude Stein - The Making of Americans (1925)
- Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
- Ernset Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- Nella Larsen - Passing (1929)
- William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
- Djuna Barnes - Nightwood (1936)
- Younghill Kang - East Goes West (1937)
- Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- John Dos Passos - U.S.A. (1937)
- John Fante - Ask the Dust (1939)
- Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep (1939)
- Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust (1939)
- John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Richard Wright - Native Son (1940)
- Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
- Dawn Powell - A Time to Be Born (1942)
- Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men (1946)
- Ann Petry - The Street (1946)
- Dorothy B Hughes - In A Lonely Place (1947)
- Jean Stafford - The Mountain Lion (1947)
- JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- EB White - Charlotte's Web (1952)
- Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man (1952)
- Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Gwendolyn Brooks - Maud Martha (1953)
- Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
- Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
- James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room (1956)
- Grace Metalious - Peyton Place (1956)
- Patricia Highsmith - Deep Water (1957)
- John Okada - No-No Boy (1957)
- Jack Kerouac - On the Road (1957)
- Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
- Joseph Heller - Catch-22 (1961)
- Madeline L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
- James Baldwin - Another Country (1962)
- Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
- Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (1962)
- Ross MacDonald - The Zebra-Striped House (1962)
- Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)
- Mary McCarthy - The Group 1963)
- Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
- James Salter - A Sport and a Pastime (1967)
- John Updike - Couples (1968)
- Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
- Susan Taubes - Divorcing (1969)
- Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
- Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- Judy Blume - Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret (1970)
- Paula Fox - Desperate Characters (1970)
- Joan Didion - Play it as it Lays (1970)
- Stanley Crawford - Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine (1972)
- Ishmael Reed - Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
- Toni Morrison - Sula (1973)
- Oscar Zeta Acosta - The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973)
- Fran Ross - Oreo (1974)
- Urula K Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974)
- James Welch - Winter in the Blood (1974)
- Gail Jones - Corregidora (1975)
- Renata Adler - Speedboat (1976)
- Leslie Marion Silko - Ceremony (1977)
- Toni Morrison - Song of Solomon (1977)
- Will Eisner - A Contract with God (1979)
- Andrew Holleran - Dancer from the Dance (1978)
- Stephen King - The Stand (1978)
- Octavia E Butler - Kindred (1979)
- Charles Portis - The Dog of the South (1979)
- Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping (1980)
- Toni Cade Bambara - The Salt Eaters (1980)
- John Crowley - Little, Big: Or, the Fairies' Parliament (1981)
- Charles Johnson - Oxherding Tale (1982)
- Jayne Anne Phillips - Machine Dreams (1984)
- Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (1985)
- Peter Taylor - A Summons to Memphis (1986)
- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons - Watchmen (1986)
- Toni Morrison - Beloved (1987)
- Octavia E Butler - Dawn (1987)
- Katherine Dunn - Geek Love (1989)
- Maxine Hong Kingston - Tripmaster Monkey (1989)
- Jessica Hagedorn - Dogeaters (1990)
- Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho (1991)
- Julia Alvarez - How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991)
- Norman Rush - Mating (1991)
- Dorothy Allison - Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
- Donna Tartt - The Secret History (1992)
- Ana Castillo - So Far From God (1993)
- Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues (1993)
- Annie Proulx - The Shipping News (1993)
- Chang-Rae Lee - Native Speaker (1995)
- Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre (1995)
- Helen Maria Viramontes - Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)
- David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)
- Chris Kraus - I Love Dick (1997)
- Don Delillo - Underworld (1997)
- Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist (1999)
- Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde (2000)
- Mark Z Danielewski - House of Leaves (2000)
- Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay (2000)
- Helen Dewitt - The Last Samurai (2000)
- Joy Williams - The Quick and the Dead (2000)
- Percival Everett - Erasure (2001)
- Rabih Alameddine - I, the Divine (2001)
- Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections (2001)
- Sandra Cisneros - Caramelo (2002)
- Debra Magpie Earling - Perma Red (2002)
- Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002)
- Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake (2003)
- Mary Gaitskill - Veronica (2005)
- Junot Diaz - The Wonderous Life of Oscar Woo (2007)
- Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
- Karen Tei Yamashita - I Hotel (2010)
- Teju Cole - Open City (2011)
- Jesmyn Ward - Salvage the Bones (2011)
- Louise Erdrich - The Round House (2012)
- Chimamanda Negozi Adichie - Americanah (2013)
- Imogen Binnie - Nevada (2013)
- Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
- Awhile Sharma - Family Life (2014)
- Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies (2015)
- NK Jemison - The Fifth Season (2015)
- Paul Beatty - The Sellout (2015)
- Việt Thanh Nguyễn - The Sympathizer (2015)
- Claude McKay - Amiable with Big Teeth (2017)
- George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
- Nick Drnaso - Sabrina (2018)
- Ling Ma - Severance (2018)
- Tommy Orange - There There (2018)
- Valeria Luiselli - Lost Children Archive (2019)
- Kevin Wilson - Nothing to See Here (2019)
- Namwali Serpell - The Old Drift (2019)
- Patricia Lockwood - No One Is Talking About This (2021)
- Honoree Fanonne Jeffers - The Love Songs of W E B Du Bois (2021)
- Catherine Lacey - Biography of X (2023)
What an exciting list. Many of the novels here are among my favourites - Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, The Group, Fahrenheit 451, The Shipping News, Visit from the Goon Squad - and I am glad they included many of the beloved books of my childhood like Charlotte's Web and Are you there God, it's me Margaret.
I have only read 30 of the titles on the list, and had expected that I would read more. I remember doing an American Literature course when I was at the University of Toronto, which included Twain, Thoreau, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and others. Many of my favourite American novels are just outside the 100 year window on which this list is based - like Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (possibly my favourite novel ever), Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and novels by Henry James.
The list reminds me that I have started and not finished many of these titles, some of which I meant to return to (A Brief History of Seven Killings) and some which I did not enjoy and gave up on (Housekeeping, A Sports and a Pastime).
Many of the books on my Fifty/five list are listed here, and some which are recent acquisitions like Ann Petry's The Street. But I also love that there are novels and authors I have never heard of, which gives me the opportunity to explore and add more titles to my wish list!
Tuesday 12 March 2024
International Booker Longlist 2024
The International Booker Prize 2024 Longlist has been announced with thirteen titles of fiction translated into English.
The longlist is as follows:
- Not a River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
- Simpatico by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon (translated by Noel Hernandez Gonzalez and Daniel Hahn)
- Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
- The Details by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
- White Nights by Urszula Honek (translated by Kate Webster)
- Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae)
- A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (translated by John Hodgson)
- The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (translated by Boris Dralyuk)
- What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
- Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo (translated by Leah Janeczko)
- The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (translated by Oonagh Stransky)
- Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)
- Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener (translated by Julia Sanches)
From a protest on the top of a factory chimney in South Korea to a transformative fishing trip in remote Argentina, from the violent streets of Kyiv in 1919 to a devastating sexual relationship in 1980s East Berlin, our longlisted books offer stunning evocations of place and time. Here are voices that reflect original angles of observation. In compelling, at times lyrical modes of expression, they tell stories that give us insight into – among other things – the ways political power drives our lives.
I’ve always looked to fiction as a way to inhabit other places, other sensibilities. And through my experience of interviewing international authors I have come to marvel at the ability of translators to expand those worlds, to deepen our understanding of different cultures, and to build a global community of readers not constricted by borders. That same excitement informed the discussions with my fellow panellists since last summer. It’s stimulating to hear about a book that’s been read from a different perspective and presented in a most articulate way. As William Kentridge put it, we are looking to be “complicit in the making of the meaning of a book”.
What my fellow jurors and I hoped to find are books that, together, we could recommend to English-speaking readers. After narrowing down 149 submitted titles to these 13, we are delighted to say, “Here, we’ve scoured the world and brought back these gifts.”
The prize awards £25,000 to the author and £25,000 to the translator, in recognition of the essential work of translators in bringing fiction to a wider audience. I need to read more translated fiction, so will be keen to investigate these titles further.
The shortlist of 6 titles will be announced on 9 April and the winner on 21 May 2024.
Sunday 10 March 2024
On the House
Australia is obsessed with property. Whenever people gather, conversations inevitably turn to the cost of housing and the rental crisis. The great Australian dream is a quarter acre block, and given our low population density, one might expect there is plenty of room for everyone to have a roof over their head. Unfortunately, this has not occurred and there is a great divide between those who have a home, and those who do not.
In his Quarterly Essay (QE92) The Great Divide - Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It, economist Alan Kohler explores how we ended up here and possible pathways out. Once upon a time, the cost of housing kept up with wage growth. In the 1950s people would have paid about 3.5x the average household income for a home, whereas now it is more like 7-8x.Kohler argues that the problem is that housing has 'been turned into speculative investment assets by the fifty years of government policy failure, financialisation and greed that resulted in exploding house prices' (p5). Kohler identifies a supply problem, with insufficient public housing from the 1960s, the lack of medium density housing within close proximity to the urban centres, and the federal/state/local divide on who controls development. While supply has dwindled, demand has grown with Howard government policies giving first home owners grants and cutting capital gains tax.
It is essential that we fix this problem. Homelessness is on the rise and the lack of public housing is horrific. Mortgage stress is significant, and many families who purchased during the pandemic with a low fixed rate, will find themselves in trouble when the fixed rate ends in coming months.
Kohler proposes several solutions to fix this crisis. He looks at addressing negative gearing, link immigration policy to infrastructure development, decentralising housing, building high speed rail to allow for commuters, and more. But he acknowledges that political leadership is needed to make unpopular but necessary decisions.
I'm a mortgage holder in Sydney, the second most expensive place to buy property on earth where the median price house is well over $1M. If I were to sell my apartment, what I would be able to purchase next would likely be smaller, and farther away from the city. Reading Kohler's essay, I realised that I am a YIMBY - Yes in my back yard! I believe that diverse communities are essential and that our cities need to be more European with more medium density dwellings catering for a cross section of society, with access to public transport and services. In NSW I can see the Minns' government making steps in this direction, reclaiming and rezoning land for parks and housing, a step in the right direction.
Saturday 9 March 2024
Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist 2024
On 5 March 2024, the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist was revealed! The annual literary award celebrating women writers has previously recognised the talents of so many gifted writers, including these past winners:
If I had to pick a shortlist, I would choose Grenville, Hammad, Enright, Kilroy and Maroo to be among those listed.