Outspoken Maleny

For twenty-six years Richard Glover held the position of host for Drive on ABC Radio Sydney. For an even longer time he has been writing a weekly column for the Sydney Morning Herald (forty-one years), making wonderfully astute (and funny) observations about life. “There’s the view that journalism is printing what someone doesn’t want printed, and that’s true, yes, but we also need to give readers an accurate sense of reality. That includes the politics and crime and corruption, but also the everyday, the ordinary, the argument over the dishwasher, the way that people talk about their partners and their children and their dogs. These things are equally important.' Richard is the author of some twenty books, including the highly praised Flesh Wounds and The Land Without Avocado, as well as two plays. His new book is How to Ruin a Child.

Joanna Jenkins is the author of three novels. They’re promoted as being crime (and sell very well under that label) but really they are social commentary at their best, clever, witty, propulsive. In Bad Neighbours, her returning character, Ruth Dawson, finds her ideal living space in an Art Deco building in Potts Point, The Lumen. A twenty-minute walk from her office in the city, the apartment boasts parquetry flooring, a wall of books and Harbour Bridge views from the sofa. It's perfect until Ben, the homeless guy, dies under the corrugated iron lean-to in the garden. The residents of The Lumen do little to hide their relief. They can cease their half-hearted attempts to find an acceptable solution to 'the Ben problem', and return to more important issues. They are not at all happy when Ruth brings in a detective.

Why, Kate Holden asks, must an essay dash like an arrow to its arrival, piercing and startling as it goes? In this series of six essays, bound together around the idea of longing and belonging, of exile and home, Holden proves that an essay can be much more than a simple dash. Each one is a grand collection of ideas that shoot off in every direction, suddenly switching and, yes, returning to pierce the reader with their lyricism and acuity. We are in the hands of a master: Holden is wonderfully ambitious, reaching for the profound, the real, for a description of where we came from and where we are. It is a treasure.

Georgia’s first novel  What I Would Do to You, won Best Debut Book at the 2025 Davitt Awards and was shortlisted for Best Crime Fiction Debut at the 2025 Danger Awards. Georgia has worked as a psychologist with both serious violent offenders and victim-survivors of crime. She was also the Senior Inspector Prosecutions for RSPCA Queensland. Her new novel begins when the central, eponymous character, Dove, has a violent confrontation with the man next door. In response she paints a sign on the front wall of her Sunshine Coast hinterland farm: 'What would you do if you had a whole day on earth free of men?'When tourists and local women respond by writing their answers on the wall, declaring their pent-up frustrations, their fears and confessions, it strikes a nerve.  With nowhere to hide from exposed secrets and shameful legacies, tensions rise, just as the town hits the headlines over a missing teen.

In The Titanic Story of Evelyn Lisa Wilkinson - one of Australia's most admired and respected media personalities - explores the life of the only Australian survivor of the sinking of the Titanic. She tells the story of a brave young nurse who wanted to see the world, fell in love, but then almost lost it all in one of the greatest maritime tragedies ever known.Somehow, the courageous role Evelyn Marsden played in the hours after the ship hit an iceberg has been forgotten. In this fascinating book Wilkinson brings together the drama of that night with Evelyn’s own extraordinary story.Lisa Wilkinson’s own story (told in the 2023 autobiography It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This) is also remarkable. Hired as a girl Friday for the teen magazine Dolly, within two years she became the editor - the youngest-ever of a national magazine - a position she used to triple the circulation before being head-hunted over to Cleo by Kerry Packer himself. Many years later she was inevitably drawn into the world of television, co-hosting the Nine Network’s Today Show, before, eventually, joining the Ten Network as host of its prime-time award-winning news and current affairs program The Project. Currently focused on her writing, Lisa is married to journalist and bestselling author Peter FitzSimons. They have three children.