An increasing number of parents are choosing to raise their children gender-neutral. What will happen if the movement grows, and we raise whole generations of people who are not assigned a binary gender at birth? What would be the flow-on effects in health and education, and for our institutions of law and citizenship?

Is it possible to shield a child…

In her introduction to Growing up Aboriginal in Australia, editor Anita Heiss writes: ‘[These] stories cover country from Nukunu to Noongar, Wiradjuri to Western Arrernte, Ku Ku Yalinji to Kunibidji, Gunditjamara to Gumbaynggirr and many places in between.’

It’s a collection of truly diverse stories – sometimes surprising and funny, often confronting and always illuminating – that paint a rich…

Michael Mohammed Ahmad is a writer whose novels explore Australia’s smouldering tribalism – found as much within its communities as between them – eschewing clichés and easy, feel-good conclusions.

His first novel, The Tribe, introduced readers to the complex family life of protagonist Bani Adam, a young boy from a religious Lebanese Muslim family in western Sydney. In The Lebs…

Rural Australia – indeed, rural anywhere – is a storytelling fixture. But in many ways, it’s specifically small towns that make a perfect setting for fiction, and a potent backdrop to coming of age.

A writer might draw on the intense social relations (or seething suspicions) of people living in each other’s pockets; the pleasures and pressures of being too near…