Will Hunt
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Articles by Will Hunt
Three in Four School Menus Breach Food Standards, And Parents Want Action
New Bite Back research has found that 76% of secondary school menus analysed had at least one confirmed violation of the current School Food Standards while 72% of parents support government checks to make sure new standards are actually followed. Crisps at break time. Chocolate on the menu. Sausage rolls and other processed meats being offered more often than the rules allow.
‘Uncle Vanya: An artificial rendition of Chekhov’s classic’ by Andrew Fuhrmann
There is the persistence of autumn – not a true autumn, in which old things break down and new life begins, but a stage autumn: a reverie with no particular past or future. It is the sweet melancholy of forever twilight. And there goes Sonya, in a faded dress, sweeping the lovely yellow leaves. Behind her, a stagehand in black reaches into a cardboard box and scatters a fresh handful, undoing her work before it is even finished. She gives up.
Young people welcome long-awaited ban on high-caffeine energy drinks for under-16s
Bite Back has welcomed the Government's confirmation that the sale of high-caffeine energy drinks to under-16s in England will be banned from April 2027, marking a major step towards protecting children's health and wellbeing. Following years of campaigning by young people, health organisations and campaigners calling for stronger action to tackle the growing availability and marketing of high-caffeine energy drinks to children.
2027 Porter Prize Judges
Mindy Gill Mindy Gill’s poems have most recently appeared in Griffith Review and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Her criticism has been published in Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books, and Meanjin. She was an Australian Book Review Rising Star. Nam Le Nam Le was born in Vietnam. He is the author of the poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Knopf, 2024), the book-length essay On David Malouf (Black Inc., 2019), and the short story collection The Boat (Knopf, 2008).
2027 Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Click here to enter the 2027 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Australian Book Review is delighted to announce that entries to the 2027 Peter Porter Poetry Prize are now open. The prize will be judged by Mindy Gill, Nam Le, and Felicity Plunkett. The shortlisted poems will appear in the January-February 2027 issue. Now in its twenty-third year, the Porter Prize is one of Australia’s most lucrative and respected poetry awards.
The obsessive pursuit of Saint Francis iconography’ by Saskia Beudel
On entering this exhibition, the first thing you see is a vast, wall-sized video projection of three women weaving. They sit close together, veiled behind innumerable fine, pale vertical threads of the loom, their faces obscured. Every now and then, a hand reaches through the threads, bursts into clarity, and carefully presses and arranges stitching at the base of the frame, the weft of the undisclosed design. They are not so much weaving as checking their handiwork at the end of day.
Advances – July 2026
The 2027 Peter Porter Poetry Prize opens for entries on July 6. Now in its twenty-third year, the prize can be said to have survived its adolescence and fully embraced its status as one of the world’s leading awards for a new poem, with $10,000 to be distributed among the five shortlisted poets. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
C101 ROCK REPORT EX-GODSMACK DRUMMER TACKLES CRITICS OF MIKE MANGINI JOINING BAND - C101 HITMAN ROCK REPORT
Speaker 1 (00:01): Here's what's trending in the world of rock. It's the iHeartRadio Rock Report. Speaker 2 (00:07): Former Dream Theater drummer Mike Mangini joining Godsmack has stirred up a lot of discussion, with former Godsmack drummer Shannon Larkin now weighing into voice his support for the move.
School Food is being rewritten, Now it’s time for champions.
Introducing School Food Champions School Food Champions are MPs who commit to standing with young people to help fix school food. They’re supporting better school food in England. They’re backing monitoring and accountability so School Food is meeting the standards children deserve. They’re helping make sure healthy food is available throughout the school day - not just on paper.
Vale David Malouf
ABR acknowledges, with deep sadness, the death of David Malouf AO. One of Australia’s most distinguished and beloved writers, the novelist, poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, and librettist has been a presiding spirit in Australian and Anglophone literatures for decades. His passing marks a profound loss to Australian letters.
Forty years searching for the Phillip Island murderer’ by Vikki Petraitis
In 1986, the quiet little community of Phillip Island gained fame for something other than penguins. Grand Guignol met what would later be termed Rural Noir: a love triangle; a young woman found murdered in her bed; another woman missing, never seen again. The crime became something of a ‘siren’s call’, according to author Vikki Petraitis, all the more ‘enthralling’ because it lacked a resolution. To this day the case remains open, at least in the legal, technical sense.
Beth Kearney reviews ‘The Other Girl’ by Annie Ernaux
The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux, translated from French by Alison L. Strayer Seven Stories Press, $17.95 pb, 96 pp ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent. Notwithstanding the vogue of autofiction, Annie Ernaux refuses this label when it is applied to her work. In her writing and interviews, she explains that she is committed to capturing as precisely as possible the truth – or at least a truth – about a given event or experience.
Zareh Ghazarian reviews ‘Parliamentary Privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand’ by Geoffrey Palmer
Parliaments are central to the functioning of liberal democracies. Yet, for many, their structures and operations remain a mystery. One area that has often escaped attention is the concept of parliamentary privilege. It is therefore timely that Geoffrey Palmer makes it central in his latest book, Parliamentary Privilege in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Nick Hordern reviews ‘Meandering to Manila’ by Keith Dalton
This is the story of a young man’s first encounter with Asia; of his deliberately slow and indirect progress, fifty years ago, from Australia through the remoter parts of the region to the Philippines. There is a tradition of Westerners being entranced by Asia. On his first youthful encounter, Joseph Conrad, who set the scene for many who came after him, found Asia ‘impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight’.
The poetics of an ancient gesture’ by Benjamin A. Saltzman
The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer tells us in his remarkable poem ‘The Bookcase’ that he obtained a set of bookshelves from a dead woman’s apartment and filled it with books. In that ordinary gesture he let in the dark world. ‘Something came from underneath,’ he says, ‘rose slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury.’ And he adds, ‘One was not allowed to turn one’s head away.’ Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review.
Backstage with Eamon Flack
Australian Book Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as the traditional custodians of the land on which it is situated in Melbourne, Victoria, and pays respect to Elders past and present. This work was developed at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne’s Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas. Australian Book Review Inc. is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z
Open Page with Amanda Lohrey
Australian Book Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as the traditional custodians of the land on which it is situated in Melbourne, Victoria, and pays respect to Elders past and present. This work was developed at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne’s Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas. Australian Book Review Inc. is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z
Or, the surprising adventures of Alexander Selkirk’ by Francesca de Tores
‘The past is always happening all over again – following itself like the inevitable curve of a goat’s horn.’ So says Alexander Selkirk in Francesca de Tores’s latest novel, Cast Away, a fictionalisation of the real-life sailor whose story partly inspired Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic, Robinson Crusoe. This sentiment suggests that the past is ever present, and by extension, a historical novel should be a window into our own time.
The question of justice
Mohammad Massoud Morsi’s second novel vivisects the 2011 Syrian civil war, his keen photographer’s eye unflinching as he renders hope and brutality onto the page. Morsi is no stranger to such crises; his twenty-year career as a journalist was forged in conflict zones including Gaza and South Lebanon.
A novel' by George Kemp
Halfway through George Kemp’s début novel, Soft Serve, an emergency SMS is sent out, announcing ‘it is too late to leave’. A bushfire is closing in on a northern NSW town, and the characters find themselves trapped in the local McDonald’s. The fire warning serves to compound an already present feeling of confinement: in this sentimental and theatrical novel, blurbed as ‘drive-thru Chekhov’, characters are trapped by their shared griefs, competing desires, and the pressure cooker of a small town.
Eli McLean reviews ‘Henry Goes Bush’ by Wayne Marshall
Plenty of ink has been spilled on the subject of Australian literature’s folkloric, dust-clouded beginnings, particularly its central figures, Henry Lawson and Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson – too much ink, maybe. Biographies abound: on Lawson alone, we have volumes by Judith Wright, Manning Clark, Colin Roderick, Grantlee Kieza, and Kerrie Davies, among others.
Our despair a tapestry
Yñiga opens in a suburb of Manila with the dramatic arrest of a ‘retired general’ whose ‘megalomania ran unchallenged for too long’. Shortly thereafter, the suburb burns down. The novel’s protagonist, a forty-year-old woman named Yñiga Calinauan, loses her house in the fire. Left with few options, she decides to return to her provincial home town, where her older sister is caring for their elderly mother, who is in the last stages of dementia. Continue reading for only $10 per month.
Gone to the birds
Johanna Bell’s latest book, Department of the Vanishing, is difficult to pin down. Like the birds forensically examined by her central character, Ava, it is at times freewheeling and at other times pinned to a board.
The sense of an ending
Just a few pages into Departure(s), Julian Barnes announces without any fanfare that ‘This will be my last book.’ Neither novel nor memoir in any fully developed sense, the book quietly reflects on its own artistic procedures as it moves through a range of generic possibilities: medical discourse, philosophical enquiry, autobiography, realist fiction, metafiction, and elegy.
Critic of the Month with Joel Deane
Australian Book Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as the traditional custodians of the land on which it is situated in Melbourne, Victoria, and pays respect to Elders past and present. This work was developed at The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne’s Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas. Australian Book Review Inc. is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z
Queen of the Night
Anthers in periwinkle elation, verdant pericarps stripped to nakedness, ambered tepals ribboning outward to a crown: the flower in lucidity, slimly tethered to its vermicelli stem. Out of the night’s black ocean the flat white coin of the moon bites a glowing hole. Beneath the tent of two infant tendrils a second bud is clouded by a figure in the glass: Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Geordie Williamson
For Carl Jung, UFOs – a phenomenon so widespread and arresting in implication that he wrote a 1958 book about them – existed as a ‘visionary rumour’. They were ‘the product of an unusual emotion’, the cause of which ‘is a situation of collective distress or danger, or a vital psychic need’.
Tim Byrne reviews ‘The Trap’ by Fiona Kelly McGregor
In Iris (2022), author Fiona Kelly McGregor reincarnated a minor footnote in Australian crime history – queer, Sydney-based sly-grogger Iris Webber – to stunning, kaleidoscopic effect. The novel crackled with a flinty, provocative confidence, enlivened on every page by the Falstaffian figure of Iris herself: keen, crafty, and pulsing with life.
Between reality and dreams
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Sahar Rabah, born and raised in Gaza, writes poetry, essays, and short fiction in Arabic and English. Her work has appeared on LitHub, The Masscahusetts Review, and elsewhere.
As the Sun Moves
How can you untie a shadow? A shadow isn’t a memory. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
‘Higher than the sun’
Where is the drama in goodness and peace? Where is the suspense, when characters are freed from conflict, bound together by love, and united to praise justice and wisdom for eternity? This is the arrangement in Paradiso, the final canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is typically seen as an anticlimax. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Mindy Gill reviews ‘Best of Australian Poems 2025’ edited by Nam Le and Jill Jones
Anthologies have long functioned as both pedagogical tools and canon-building exercises, attempting – however provisionally – to define a literary moment. ‘Best of’ anthologies, in particular, occupy an uneasy position in literary culture, promising a definitive snapshot of excellence, while at the same time exposing the limits of authority and taste. What ‘best’ might mean in a field as diverse as Australian poetry remains unresolved.
Georgina Arnott reviews ‘The Power of Adrienne Rich: A biography’ by Hilary Holladay
The American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) had a strange childhood. It gives this biography a grisly feel: you can see, from the start, that things are not going to go well. Biographer Hilary Holladay writes: ‘Dr. Rich, a rising pathologist at Johns Hopkins University’s medical school, had decided his firstborn would be a genius; he would make a project of it.’ By four, Adrienne played Mozart; by five, she recited Blake and Keats. Continue reading for only $10 per month.
The fierce, unruly life of Jessica Mitford’ by Carla Kaplan
Putting to one side the Mountbatten-Windsor-Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, is there another twentieth-century British family that has been subjected to as much attention as the Mitfords? Biographies, articles, television series, autobiographies, a musical, and a graphic biography have presented to us Hitler-obsessed Unity; beautiful, anti-Semitic, fascist Diana; socially ambitious Deborah; and Nancy, the witty and caustic novelist. A biography of their mother, Muv, has recently been published.
What have I missed?
Mark Oppenheimer’s biography of Judy Blume makes a deserved and largely convincing case for Blume’s status as one of the most significant American children’s authors of the twentieth century, and for Blume as a person who is thoughtful, kind, and canny. Yet, the book endeavours to achieve this mostly through description rather than interpretation, depending on its catalogue of events, decisions, and interactions, rather than its analysis, which is present but limited.
Eleanor Spencer-Regan
Susan Lever’s A.D. Hope: A life arrives, one suspects, at precisely the moment when its subject can be most clearly apprehended – not as the embattled custodian of a superseded poetic order, but as a figure whose complexities are now, in a certain sense, newly legible. Few figures in Australian literary culture have seemed both as securely canonical, and as curiously unsettled, as Hope.
Secrets of the world’s most curious creature’ by Danielle Clode
On my daughter’s bookshelf is a picture book, based on an old Jaru story, called The Echidna and the Shade Tree (1984). It tells of the echidna’s transformation from an ordinary creature into the one we know today, the antipodean hedgehog armour-plated with keratin spines. The other animals go off to hunt but echidna stays behind, looking after the children beneath the shade of a humongous tree.
‘According to their convictions’
The stone walls of London’s Old Bailey criminal court bear a plaque dated 1670. The plaque commemorates the decision that established the ‘the right of juries to give their verdict according to their convictions’. Today, in Britain, the justice system – including its key pillars of jury trials, the rule of law, and judicial independence – is in peril, alongside basic civil liberties, such as freedom of speech. Continue reading for only $10 per month.
The slander of women and the gendered history of defamation law’ by Jessica Lake
Special Damage: The slander of women and the gendered history of defamation law by Jessica Lake Stanford University Press, US$28 pb, 246 pp ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Clinton Fernandes
Assigned hierarchies are social stratification systems in which a person’s social position is assigned at birth through inherent, involuntary characteristics. Examples include the burakumin (‘pollution abundant’) minority of Japan, the paekchŏng of Korea, and the lower strata among the Wolof and Manding peoples of West Africa. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in.
Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it’ by Cory Doctorow
Enshittification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it by Cory Doctorow Verso, $44.99 hb, 192 pp ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Southeast Asia and Australia’s future’ by Michael Wesley
It is axiomatic that Australia’s security environment has deteriorated. Strategic competition in our region continues to grow, and our international relationships are becoming more complex and multidimensional. Traditional challenges to sovereign borders and maritime trade routes have combined with new risks to regional peace and security that have been enabled by technological advancements and changing tactics.
A memoir from the frontlines of diplomacy’ by Lachlan Strahan
The Curious Diplomat: A memoir from the frontlines of diplomacy by Lachlan Strahan Monash University Publishing, $39.99 pb, 616 pp ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
A memoir from the frontlines of diplomacy’ by Lachlan Strahan
The Curious Diplomat: A memoir from the frontlines of diplomacy by Lachlan Strahan Monash University Publishing, $39.99 pb, 616 pp ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent. Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Splitting the Hive
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Debbie Lim’s poems have appeared regularly in the Best Australian Poems series and Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, among numerous other anthologies and journals.
Vale David Malouf AO
ABR acknowledges, with deep sadness, the death of David Malouf AO. One of Australia’s most distinguished and beloved writers, the novelist, poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, and librettist has been a presiding spirit in Australian and Anglophone literatures for decades. His passing marks a profound loss to Australian letters.
Jane Gleeson-White
In 1983, when Erin Vincent was fourteen, her parents were hit by a tow truck while crossing the road. Her mother died instantly. Her father died in hospital one month later.
Diane Stubbings reviews ‘The Mother Is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why: Finding freedom in the cage’ by Gemma Parker
In the National Gallery of Victoria’s largely underwhelming exhibition Mother: Stories from the NGV collection (2026), a handful of works stand out. One is French-American artist Louise Bourgeois’s Sainte Sébastienne (1992). In this work, Bourgeois reimagines the martyred Saint Sebastian as a voluptuous headless woman, her belly heavy with child, arrows threatening her marked flesh. The image, according to Bourgeois, reflects ‘a state of being under attack, of being anxious and afraid ...
Alexandra Smith reviews ‘Bring Back Yesterday’ by Bob Carr
Politicians are egotists. All boast an innate ability to talk about themselves, their successes, and the failures of others without hesitation. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest serving premier and one-time foreign minister, is the ultimate politician. His signature greeting, in his trademark deep baritone voice, ‘Good to see you’, is the perfect social cover for a public figure who could not possibly remember everyone he has met.
Distrust, brinkmanship, and national pride
The US-Israel war with the Islamic Republic of Iran started as a war of choice on February 28. Iran had not threatened the United States or its allies, nor was it on the brink of producing nuclear weapons – as verified by US National Intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Agency – nor had it closed the Strait of Hormuz.
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