‘Budgerigar’, ‘quandong’, ‘Torana’, ‘Canberra’ – there are many Aboriginal words in everyday use by both non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. What do we gain from knowing and learning First Nations words? And how can we embed more traditional language into the daily lives of all Australians?

At least 250 Indigenous Australian languages were spoken on this continent in 1788. Today only…

With her seventh novel, Home Fire, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie has pulled off an improbable feat.

Home Fire is a work of great ambition (it's a rigorously researched story of global terrorism, drawing its structure from Sophocles' Antigone) and it's also a gripping page-turner. It's a stinging, and often funny, indictment on our facile political debates about terror, security and…

Simon Schama is a British broadcaster and scholar who is famous for his limitless energy and grand-scale intellectual undertakings.

He’s a familiar figure on the BBC as well as a professor at Columbia University, and he’s produced multi-volume histories of Britain, documentaries with momentous names like The American Future and a TV series called Simon Schama’s Power of Art…

English historian Antony Beevor is credited with transforming the military history genre. He’s breathed new life into the popular understanding of World War II – holding cherished national myths up to harsh light and enthralling readers with his gift for storytelling.

For his troubles, he’s been knighted and he’s topped bestseller lists, but he’s also sometimes hit raw nerves at…

‘This is a story that gets to the root of how my society is structured right now … There’s a way that prison is invisible to a middle-class person. It’s not a conspiracy, but it may be by design in certain regards. It’s a serious subject for a novelist.’

Rachel Kushner is among America’s brightest literary stars. With her previous…

Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Female Persuasion, is about public pedestals and feminist friction.

Wolitzer herself is a feminist powerhouse who wrote her first novel, Sleepwalking, while still at university. A precocious talent, she was mentored by the famous essayist and screenwriter Nora Ephron.

Today, she’s the author of 12 acclaimed novels, including The Interestings and The Uncoupling…