Les Murray's latest, Taller When Prone

Poet Les Murray is favourite Australian in the race for the Nobel Prize according to British bookmakers Ladbrokes.

The bookies put Les Murray at an equal seventh in the running for the prize at 11/1 along with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. The current frontrunner is Swedish poet and translator Tomas Transtromer at 5/1. Two other Australian authors made…

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Former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon delivered last Thursday’s Lunchbox/Soapbox on the subject of leadership. Comparing what she argued are old and new models of leadership, Nixon stressed that qualities such as independence, lateral thinking and openness to the needs of others are key to leadership in a progressive society. She also acknowledged the reluctance of some to leave behind…

An unauthorised sequel of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye won’t be released in North America.

Publisher’s Weekly reports that a settlement has been reached with the book’s Swedish author Fredrik Colting (publishing under the pseudonym John David California), who won’t “publish or otherwise distribute the book, e-book, or any other editions of 60 Years Later…

How does an expression of uncertain provenance and contested spelling, for which each language already has its own long-standing version, take over the world? Allan Metcalf, author of OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, has published an introduction on the expression and its spread across the world. With several alternative spellings (okay, o.k. and ok), the term seems to have originated…