Gwen Harwood has long been recognised as one of Australia's finest poets and librettists. She had a quicksilver intellect and a rare ability to go directly to the heart of whatever occupied her. Generosity of spirit, biting wit, and a superb command of a language characterise both her poetry and her letters to friends.The letters in this edition - written between 1943 and her death in 1995 - present a strong claim that Gwen Harwood be considered this country's greatest letter-writer. The selection includes less than one-tenth of the letters transcribed by her biographer Gregory Kratzmann. Half of the letters here were written to her good friend Tony Riddell, to whom she dedicated all but the last of her volumes of poetry. Her correspondents include major figures from the fields of literature, art and music in Australia, and her love of letter-writing shows the value she accorded to friendship.

A masterful portrait of a major Australian writer, her incandescent poetry and her battles to be heard in a male-dominated literary establishment. Winner of the 2023 National Biography Award The first biography of Gwen Harwood (1920–1995), one of Australia’s most significant and distinctive poets. Harwood is renowned for her brilliance, but loved for her humour, rebellion and mischief. A public figure by the end of her life, she was always deeply protective of her privacy, and even now, some twenty-six years after her death, little is known of the experiences that gave rise to her extraordinary poems. This book follows Harwood from her childhood in 1920s Brisbane to her final years in Hobart in the 1990s. It traces how a lively, sardonic and determined young woman built a career in the conservative 1950s, blasting her way into the patriarchal strongholds of Australian poetry. Harwood refused to be bound by convention, ‘liberating’ herself, to use her word, before women’s lib existed. Yet she also struggled for much of her life to combine marriage and motherhood with her creative ambitions. In this sense, she is a twentieth-century everywoman. She is also a unique and powerful presence in Australian literary history, a poet who challenged orthodoxies and spoke in a remarkable range of voices. This illuminating, moving biography reveals a deeply passionate figure both at odds with her time and deeply of it, and reclaims and celebrates this important Australian writer. ‘Gwen Harwood, that excellent poet and critic, deserves a sympathetic and lively biography. Ann-Marie Priest, to her credit, has just written that book.’ —Ann Blainey, winner of 2009 National Biography Award 'Read this meticulous biography with Harwood's poetry in hand, and chase down every poem that Priest cites.' —The Sydney Morning Herald 'Ann-Marie Priest has captured completely the sprite-like nature of one of Australia's finest poets… Through these pages, the great poet feels so alive.' —Judges comments, National Biography Award

This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.

***Highly commended in the 2016 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript*** 'I need to be a writer, ' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.' She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans. A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer. They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation-their 'need' to be a writer-that would not let them rest. Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image. *** "Ann-Marie Priest writes with admirable clarity and a strong sense of appreciation for her subjects. A Free Flame weaves fascinating biographical details and critical insights into an examination of the various ways in which these talented artists negotiated the tension between their sense of vocation and the hindering cultural expectations they faced as women." --James Ley, critic and judge of the Dorothy Hewett Award [Subject: Non-Fiction, Biography, Gender Studies]

In the decades after World War II, the literary scene in Australia flourished: local writers garnered international renown and local publishers sought and produced more Australian books. The traditional view of this postwar period is of successful male writers, with women still confined to the domestic sphere. In "Nine Lives," Susan Sheridan rewrites the pages of history to foreground the women writers who contributed equally to this literary renaissance. Sheridan traces the early careers of nine Australian women writers born between 1915 and 1925, who each achieved success between the mid 1940s and 1970s. Judith Wright and Thea Astley published quickly to resounding critical acclaim, while Gwen Harwood's frustration with chauvinistic literary editors prompted her pseudonymous poetry. Fiction writers Elizabeth Jolley, Amy Witting and Jessica Anderson remained unpublished until they were middle-aged; Rosemary Dobson, Dorothy Hewett and Dorothy Auchterlonie Green started strongly as poets in the 1940s, but either reduced their output or fell silent for the next twenty years. Sheridan considers why their careers developed differently from the careers of their male counterparts and how they balanced marriage, family and writing. This illuminating group biography offers a fresh perspective on mid-twentieth century Australian literature, and the women writers who helped to shape it.

Following his participation in James Cook's circumnavigation in HMS Endeavour (1768-71), Joseph Banks developed an extensive global network of scientists and explorers. His correspondence shows how he developed effective working links with the British Admiralty and with the generation of naval officers who sailed after Cook. Volume 6 Letters 1801–1805

A collection of the late poet's only published book is joined with thirteen uncollected poems, with themes of transformation, suicide, and the eternal.