New Zealand author Joanne Drayton spoke to Arts Alive’s Vincent O’Donnell when she was in Melbourne to present Sisters in Crime 19th Davitt Awards on 31 August 2019. The program was syndicated to 40+ community radio stations across Australia. The interview goes for around 20 minutes. Credits: Vincent O’Donnell and Joanne Drayton
The Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival (TAF2019) is Tasmania’s newest biennial literary festival and the first writers’ festival in the Huon Valley. The festival’s theme, Murder She Wrote, is inspired by Agatha Christie, the Queen of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Festival director, crime writer (and Sister in Crime member) Dr L.J.M. Owen, …
Sisters in Crime events have had many weird and wonderful titles over the past three 28 years but never one so engaging and amusing as “Deadbeat Brothers and the trouble they cause,” which was conceived by Robyn Walton, Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President. By amazing coincidence the protagonists in three new crime books by JM Green, …
The biographer and the detective are not as far apart as you might imagine. This analogy has been made before, and there are much less generous ones. Famously, commentator, Janet Malcolm, likened the biographer to an ‘eavesdropper’, a ‘voyeur’, a ‘snoop’. Some times what I do feels uneasily close to these transgressive manifestations. Not literally, …
New Zealand-born Melbourne based author and reviewer, Lucy Sussex, turns her gaze back across the ditch to Joanne Drayton who is presenting Sisters in Crime’s 19th Davitt Awards on Saturday 31 August in Melbourne. (Click here to book.) New Zealand writer Joanne Drayton is primarily a biographer, her interests ranging from art to true crime, …
Rachael Brown was one of the crime writers who spoke at Hitlist on 3 July, the Wheeler Centre event about the current state of crime writing. Serial Davitt winner Emma Viskic compered the session which also included fellow Sister in Crime, Sulari Gentill, plus, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, Garry Disher, and Mark Brandi. I want to …
Sisters in Crime Australia has announced a shortlist of 25 books for its 19th Davitt Awards for best crime books by Australian women – nine adult novels, five Young Adult (YA) novels, five children’s novels, and six non-fiction books. Twelve titles are also battling it out for the best debut book award. Jacqui Horwood, the …
Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre presented a brilliant session on the current state of crime writing on 3 July. As the official notice said: “It’s no mystery that Australian crime writers are on some kind of a rampage – some kind of a spree– filling bookshops, racing up bestseller lists and taking over big and small screens …
In 1992 Sisters in Crime co-convenor, Carmel Shute, was fortunate to interview pioneering Australian crime writer, Charlotte Jay, on the eve of the re-issuing of her 1952 novel, Beat Not the Bones, which had the rare distinction of winning the inaugural Edgar Allen Poe Mystery Writers of America Award. (Raymond Chandler won the following year.) …
I’m a children’s educational writer by trade, but recently I’ve just released a crime-ish adult book, Life Before. People ask me how the two types of writing mesh together? Has being an educational writer been a help or a hindrance to writing for adults? My answer to that is that my background is probably more …