AustLit

'KYD Writers’ Workshop and Extraordinary Routines bring you a monthly column delving into the routines, writing habits, rituals, challenges and triumphs of a diversity of Australian writers. In this edition, author and Saturday Paper editor Erik Jensen sheds a little light on the ‘unending scramble’ that is his daily routine as well as his thoughts on journalism, perfectionism, and what to do when you have no idea what to do.' (Introduction)

'Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s confronting new novel The Lebs (Hachette Australia) is out this month. As far as Bani Adam is concerned, Punchbowl Boys is the arse end of the earth. Though he’s a Leb and they control the school, he is a romantic in a sea of hypermasculinity and soon this conflict will reach an unavoidable tipping point. Bani must come to terms with his place in this hostile, hopeless world, while dreaming of so much more.'  (Introduction)

'The winter of 1962–63 was one of England’s coldest on record. Also known as the Big Freeze of 1963, it brought with it unusually large snow drifts, left icicles hanging off houses, and caused lakes and rivers to freeze over. It is in the midst of this unforgiving winter that Robert Lukins has set his debut novel, The Everlasting Sunday. Seventeen-year-old Radford is sent away from his family to Goodwin Manor, a boarding school for young men who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Almost immediately, Radford is accepted by the other boys in the Manor as one of their kind, and is taken under the wing of his highly confident peer, West. All the boys at the Manor are troubled – their pasts have damaged them, and loom beneath the surface of their day to day lives. When an ex-resident of Goodwin Manor returns, he disrupts the relative harmony the boys have been living in, and causes irreparable damage to the refuge they have constructed for themselves.' (Introduction)