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Kerrie Davies

Miles Franklin Undercover (2025)

In this real-life sequel to My Brilliant Career, Kerrie uncovers a little-known period in Miles' life, from the servant's quarters of Sydney and Melbourne's wealthy houses to volatile Chicago, in the turbulent years after her early success. Davies draws on a never-before-published manuscript and diary extracts from Miles' year undercover as a servant, intimate correspondence with poet Banjo Paterson, and archival sources from Australia and Chicago.

Paul Dawson

Lines of Desire (2025)

�ʲ��ܱ�’s Lines of Desire mines the urgencies and paradoxes of contemporary Australian culture, from an agonistic self-interrogation of Asian-Australian identity to a skewering of the reductive categories of left and right in political debate. His poems are permeated by an awareness of the shaping hand of social media in our daily lives, while seeking to fashion a lyrical perspective from the conceptual language of philosophy and criticism.

Brigitta Olubas

Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters (2024) (coedited with Susan Wyndham)

Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene (2024)

These two volumes of Shirley Hazzard’s edited correspondence – one with acclaimed Australian novelist, , and the other with the great scholar of Japanese Literature, – bring to light new perspectives on Australian writers’ relations with the larger world; the first providing a record of the decades when modern Australian literature was coming into being, and the second capturing a lost world of amateur scholarship and literary devotion that flourished in the decades leading up to globalisation.

Helen Groth and Julian Murphet, (eds.):

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies (2024)

Helen and Julian present a comprehensive set of new research on the relationship between sound and writing over time from a range of eminent, established and emerging sound studies scholars. Their Companion considers a broad range of sound studies topics, including music in writing; the inscription of listening; worlding through sound; military and industrial noise; the gender of sound; racialised soundscapes; theatrical sounds; literature and sound media; and sonic epistemology. 

Sigi Jöttkandt, Prudence Gibson, Marie Sierra and Anna Westbrook, (eds.):

Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales (2024)

In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Here, herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages.

Sigi Jöttkandt

The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (2024)

In The Nabokov Effect, Sigi introduces us to another Vladimir Nabokov, one who stands at the 21st century with a literary provocation: how should we read literature in these strange new times when the older patterns of critical analysis and interpretation seem to have reached their limit?

Prudence Gibson

Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium (2023)

In The Plant Thieves, Prue explores the secrets of the National Herbarium of New South Wales and unearths remarkable stories of plant naming wars, rediscovered lost species, First Nations agriculture, illegal drug labs and psychoactive plant knowledge. She reveals the tale of the anti-inflammatory plant that saved a herbarium manager when she was collecting in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, stories about the secret wollemi pine plantation (from one of its botanical guardians) and the truth about a beach daisy that has changed so much in 100 years that it needs to be completely reclassified. She also follows the story of the black bean Songline, a recent collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, to find the route of this important agriculture plant.

Brigitta Olubas

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2023)

This biography tells the story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta, as authorised biographer, traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Shirley Hazzard’s formidable, beguiling presence. Hazzard was the last of a generation of self-taught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times, “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Shortlisted for National Biography Award (2024), Magarey Medal for Biography (2024), Prime Minister’s Award for Nonfiction (2023), Nib Literary Award (2023). Included in The New Yorker Best Books (2022) and Kirkus Best Books.

Helen Groth and Julian Murphet, (eds.):

Writing the Global Riot. Literature in a Time of Crisis (2023)

One of the key contentions of Helen’s and Julian’s edited collection is that literature has done far more than merely record or register riotous practices. Rather literature has, in variable ways, used them as raw material to stimulate and accelerate its own formal development and critical responsiveness. Keenly attuned to formal variations, the contributors analyse literature’s fraught dialogue with the histories of violence that are bound up in the riot as an inherently volatile form of collective action.

Paul Dawson

The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel (2023)

In his latest book, Paul looks anew at the historical relationship between the genre of the novel and the concept of fictionality, arguing that existing scholarship on the emergence of realist fiction has been shaped by the trope of the death of the novel. The unexplored logic of this premise is that the novel was born anticipating its own demise, with both its requiem and its reflexive origins legible in the ontological challenge of postmodern metafiction.

Paul Dawson and Maria Mäkelä, (eds.):

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. New York: Routledge (2022)

The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Brigitta Olubas

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2022)

Brigitta tells the story of a girl from the suburbs of Sydney, Australia who fell early under the spell of words and sought out books as her companions. In the process she transformed and indeed created her life. She became a woman of the world who felt injustice keenly and a deep and original thinker, who wrote some of the most beautiful novels - Transit of Venus and The Great Fire among them - and always with an eye to the ways we reveal ourselves to another.

Andrew Brooks

Inferno (2021)

Andrew’s book, which reimagines Dante’s Hell in an age of raging bushfires and endless bureaucratic violence, suggests a way to get from one burning world to another. You need love, kimchi, Carly Rae Jepsen, and the promise of the other side. Andrew writes with a disarming breeziness, picking up embers and changing their course.

Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks, (eds.):

�鶹��madouwork (2021)

�鶹��madouwork is done in all those ‘illegitimate’ places, which are everywhere, if one takes the time to look and listen. And even if done in isolation, in all the places where nonhistories live, this work is never done alone. In �鶹��madouwork, Astrid and Andrew offer a guide for this reading, taking study to be a lifelong practice. It suggests a model for homework as the promise we make to each other through study and to the ghosts who carry us forward.

Laetitia Nanquette

Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution. Production and Circulation in Iran and the World (2021)

Laetitia explores how Iranian literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present. She looks at prose productions in particular, analysing several genres and media. Taking Iran as a starting point, Nanquette explores the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society. She then turns to the diaspora – with a focus on North America, Western Europe and Australia – and the world beyond Iranians to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland.

Fiona Morrison

Christina Stead and the Matter of America (2019)

Fiona explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity.

John Attridge and Helen Rydstrand, (eds.):

Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art (2019)

In Modernist Work, John and Helen investigate an important but relatively neglected topic in modernist studies, demonstrating the central relevance of the concept of “work” to a diverse selection of writers and artists and opening up pathways for future research. Several individual chapters discuss canonical figures, including Richard Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Gertrude Stein, but Modernist Work also addresses contexts that are chronologically and geographically foreign to the main stream of modernist studies, such as Swedish proletarian writing, Haitian nationalism and South African inheritors of Dada.

Sean Pryor

Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World (2017)

Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, Sean offers a formalist argument about how the poems of T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Macleod understand themselves and their situation. We discover that diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world.

Roanna Gonsalves

The Permanent Resident (2016)

A woman who can’t swim wades into a suburban pool. An Indian family sits down to an Australian Christmas dinner. A single mother’s offer to coach her son’s soccer team leads to an unexpected encounter. A recent migrant considers taking the fall for a second generation ‘friend’. A wife refuses to let her husband look at her phone. An international student gets off a train at night. Roanna’s 16 short stories reveal the aspirations, guilt, and perils of what it is to be an Indian immigrant in Australia in the 21st century. Winner of the 2018 NSW Premier's Literary Awards (Multicultural NSW Award). Longlisted for the 2018 Dobbie Literary Award. Published in India and the rest of South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger Books).

Elizabeth McMahon

Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016)

Elizabeth’s book invites us to see how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. Her book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginary of European colonisation. She prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands: their real and material conditions and their symbolic resonance from antiquity into globalised modernity.