Drawing on Clarke’s early journalism, Hopkins’s memories of Clarke from their time as schoolboy intimates in England, and the pair’s decades-long correspondence after Clarke’s emigration to Australia in 1863, this volume provides an unprecedented glimpse of the author of For the Term of His Natural Life. It is laced with anecdotal riches, including Clarke’s habit of depositing his unfinished cigars in the mouth of a green metal lion as he entered the Melbourne Public Library. The lion, smoking the cigar, became a signal to his friends that Marcus was within.

Posthumous Rosenberg

Few recent Australian memoirs have garnered as many prizes or laudations as those of Jacob Rosenberg, who died in October 2008, aged eighty-six. These were late offerings from a man who, imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during the war, seemed unlikely to reach the age of twenty-five. East of Time appeared in 2005; Sunrise West in 2007. Reviewing it in the October 2007 issue, the Editor wrote, ‘They seem as profound as anything in our autobiographical literature ... Neither book should be out of print for long.’ Rosenberg’s fertile last years were not exclusively devoted to autobiography, of which he was an almost incongruously lyrical master. This month, Allen & Unwin will issue his posthumous novel, The Hollow Tree, described as ‘a parable of love and loyalty in a time of war’. ABR will review it in the next issue.

More bites of the cherry

Pleasing it was to learn of the recent success of Peter Porter’s new collection, the winningly titled Better Than God. It has won The Age Book of the Year Award for poetry, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, worth £10,000. Porter has been publishing collections since 1961 (the first was Once Bitten, Twice Bitten). Reviewing the new book in our May issue, John Kinsella praised it as ‘remarkable’ and described Porter as ‘a poet of great lyric beauty when he wants to be ... impressively able to embed this in social (or religious) satire’. Porter is the only poet on the impressive Forward shortlist to have won it before (sometimes a help, often a curse), but our money is on the Australian, one of the finest poets writing in English.

Political lives on the road

Each year ABR is delighted to be associated with the HRC Seymour Lecture on Biography, which is hosted by the Biography Institute at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU. Endowed by Dr John Seymour and Dr Heather Munro, this notable lecture is now in its fifth year. Professor David Day, the author of major studies of several Australian prime ministers (Nicholas Brown reviews his latest, Andrew Fisher: An Underestimated Man, in this issue), will deliver this year’s lecture in September. The title of his address is ‘Writing Political Lives: Curtin, Chifley, Fisher’. Once again, the Seymour Lecture will be presented in three cities. Here are some details – Canberra: National Library of Australia, September 9; University of Technology, Sydney, September 11; and Melbourne: State Library of Victoria, September 17. These lectures, all commencing at 6 p.m., are free events and open to the public. ABR will publish the Seymour Lecture later in the year. Full details appear on page 4.

Arrested youths

Since its announcement in July, ABR and Copyright Agency Limited’s inaugural Young Calibre Prize has garnered early interest in high school and university English departments and beyond, with some uncertainty about the meaning of ‘imaginative non-fiction’, as specified in the competition’s entry guidelines. ABR – when explaining the concept to interested under-twenty-one-year-olds – is now adept at espousing Truman Capote’s definition of the form, as that ‘using all the apparatus of a fiction artist on a journalistic subject’. First prize money for Young Calibre is $3000; entries close on December 1. Free copies of the magazine, including a Young Calibre entry form, are available to potential applicants and interested teachers by request email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Changes at ABR

Rebecca Starford left the magazine in July to become an editor at Affirm Press after four years with ABR, initially as an editorial volunteer, the last two and a half as Deputy Editor. Mark Gomes, who joined us in May as the APA Editorial Intern, becomes Assistant Editor (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). Amy Baillieu, a trusty volunteer since 2005, is now Junior Editor (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).