Read like a (Tasmanian) writer
Make a cup of tea, get comfortable and settle in as some of Tasmania's favourite writers share their favourite books and recent recommendations with Sarah Aitken.
Kate Kruimink
Kate Kruimink’s first novel, A Treacherous Country, won the Vogel and this year her second, Heartsease, won the Tasmanian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. She is Fiction Editor at Island .
What’s the best book you've read recently?
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken. It’s deeply weird, but also has this tender, emotional heart. I love a bit of weirdness that has actual narrative purpose.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
This is a tricky question (I could name 10 books easily) so I’m going to cheat and give you two. The first one is a picture book: Sky Country by Aunty Patsy Cameron and Lisa Kennedy. It’s a gentle, magical story, with a strong, clear Palawa voice. I feel ashamed when I think of how ignorant I was growing up here, and I’m beyond glad my children are listening to Palawa stories. The second one is Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World by Jane Rawson, which is a collection of essays about nature and humanity so beautifully written you’re left feeling quite hopeful, which is a rare and precious thing.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve just started Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez and it’s compulsive and gloriously terrifying.
Kate Gordon
Kate Gordon has written many award-winning books for young adults, including Aster's Good, Right Things, which won the CBCA Book of the Year for Younger Readers in 2021. Her latest books are Aster’s Next, Good Thing, The Haunting of Hindmarsh Hall and The Disappearing Circus, the last written with Helen Edwards.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Helen Edwards’ Legend of the Lighthouse Moon is a beautiful, whimsical, magical love letter to family and the sea. It’s a deep and poignant middle-grade novel that’s part contemporary drama and part folk tale and I absolutely loved it.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
One Careless Night by Christina Booth, a heartbreakingly beautiful picture book about the last thylacine. It’s so stunningly illustrated and the spare, poetic prose makes me cry every time. There is such power to be found in children’s books, and picture books in particular and, for me, Christina is the absolute best example of this. I challenge you to read this book without being intensely moved, and without wanting to fight to make sure that we don’t lose more of our unique, astonishing wildlife.
What are you reading at the moment?
Apart from rereading Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox with my toddler (the twist at the end gets us both every time!), I am reading AL Tait’s Willow Bright’s Secret Plot, which is a gorgeous upper-middle-grade mystery about the healing power of nature. I’m also re-reading John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis and I’ve also just bought Anne Morgan’s new picture book about tardigrades. I love her work!
Lian Tanner
Lian Tanner has won three Aurealis Awards, a NSW Premier's Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award, a Davitt Award for Best Children’s Crime Novel, and the State Library of NSW’s Russell Prize for Humour Writing for Young People. Her books include Spellhound, the and Rita’s Revenge.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
The Stranger Times by C.K. McDonnell. A woman struggling to get by after her divorce takes a job at a trashy newspaper that reports obviously fake supernatural events (‘Pub toilet possessed by the devil’, that sort of thing). The newspaper is chaotic and the editor is a foul-mouthed drunk, but when someone dies they realise that some of the stories they previously dismissed as nonsense are, in fact, terrifyingly real. A daft and wonderful book.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
Kate Gordon writes terrific children’s books, and one of my favourites is The Heartsong of Wonder Quinn. It has a Gothic fairytale feel to it and is a haunting story of a lonely orphan at a boarding school, who finds unexpected friendship.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading The Sign for Home by Blair Fell, which I kind of stumbled upon but am loving. It’s the story of Arlo, a 23-year-old DeafBlind man who has been raised by very strict Jehovah’s Witnesses, and his new interpreter Cyril, a middle-aged atheist. We get the story from both their points of view, as Cyril starts enlarging Arlo’s world.
Yulan Jack
Yulan Jack 杰克玉兰 is a Singaporean-Australian writer, actor and musician. She is a graduate of the A.R.T Institute at Harvard, and a past recipient of the Margaret Scott Tasmanian Young Writer’s Fellowship. Her work has featured in publications including Island magazine and Peril. In 2022, she was named by Asialink as one of 40-Under-40 Most Influential Asian Australians.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. My heart split right open.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
A book of poetry by poet Esther Ottaway called She Doesn’t Seem Autistic. It gives voice to experiences of female neurodiversity, laying down “the paper doll of stereotype” (to quote one of her poems). It’s tender and gorgeous, and we all need more poetry in our lives.
What are you reading at the moment?
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang! It’s a collection of short stories detailing the tightly intersecting lives of Chinese families in 1990s New York City. Her prose is juicy and obscene. I’ve never read anything quite like it.
Arianne James
Arianne James’ writing has taken her to Varuna, The Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, Patterdale House and Chateau d’Orquevaux. She currently coordinates TasWriters’ youth workshop program and hosts The Book Shelf on Edge Radio where she interviews people from the Tasmanian literary community and beyond. Arianne’s debut novel, Second Skin, will be published in 2026.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
It has to be Three Juliets by Minnie Darke. It’s a tender, moving love story about mothers and daughters, dressmaking and travel, of family lost and gained. It will shatter your heart in the best way.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
I adored The Whisky Widow by Karen Brooks, her latest historical novel. I love how she brings 18th century Scotland so vividly to life: it's a love letter to whisky distilling and the women who risked everything to keep it afloat. I’ve also just finished The Good Losers by Meg Bignell, which was an absolute joy.
What are you reading at the moment?
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. It’s for Once Upon: a Book Club, which I run at Fullers Bookshop. So far I’m loving it. I’m also reading Bridget Crack by Rachel Leary. It won the Tasmania Book Prize in 2019 and tells the story of 21-year-old convict Bridget. It’s lyrical, beautifully paced and utterly compelling.
Gan Ainm
Gan Ainm’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in Island magazine, Mascara Literary Review, and forthcoming in affirmations: of the modern. It has also been selected for both local and international prizes, including the Island Nonfiction Prize and the University of Essex’s Wild Writing Prize.
What’s the best book you've read recently?
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright. That an Australian novel would be that adventurous not just in length, but in storytelling mode, sentence structure, voice and content, and that it would be so warmly received and celebrated by many of the country’s biggest literary awards, was a galvanising thing to see.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey. Really anything by Amanda is a knockout, but this was written with a kind of maturity and deft hand that can only come with age and experience. She’s a writer’s writer, and someone who makes me look forward to writing while getting older.
What are you reading at the moment?
Benang: from the Heart by Kim Scott; I’m loving it deeply. A story about “white-passing” Aboriginality that is equal parts disorienting, confronting and liberating, reflective of the identity itself and told with a confident and uncompromising authorial vision.
Meg Bignell
Meg Bignell is a writer and a farmer. Her hit novel The Angry Women’s Choir won the Premier's Prize for Fiction – People's Choice Award this year. Her latest, The Good Losers, was just released.
What’s the best book you've read recently?
The Season by Helen Garner. I don’t know how Helen does it, but it’s a beautiful story of love and family and boyhood and sport all packaged down into her simple, glorious sentences.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
I can’t decide between Graft by Maggie MacKellar, and The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey. One is memoir, one is fiction, but both feature the sort of sublime writing our Tasmania deserves.
What are you reading at the moment?
The Names by Florence Knapp. It’s a uniquely structured novel with a highly original premise and I’m really enjoying it. I can tell it’s going to make me cry.
Maggie MacKellar
Maggie MacKellar is a writer and historian. Her most recent memoir, Graft, details a year on the land on a merino farm on the East Coast and won the Premier’s Prize for Non-fiction this year.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane; they’re linked short stories and are just brilliant. And Ripeness by Sarah Moss. She is a superb storyteller.
What’s your favourite recent Tasmanian book?
Limberlost by Robbie Arnott, Question 7 by Richard Flanagan and The Good Losers by Meg Bignell; all of them are really different. I loved Limberlost because we are now living where it is set and, like all of Robbie’s books, the actual place is a character in itself, so he’s gifted me a way of seeing the new landscape of the upper Tamar Valley. I loved Question 7 for the way Richard writes about his mother. The chapter where he’s trapped on the Franklin is also extraordinary. And The Good Losers is perfect holiday reading: laugh-out-loud-funny social satire set around a rowing club in Launceston.
Our writers' favourite Tassie reading getaways
Kate Kruimink: "The West Coast, so I could sit inside by the fire with the rain hammering on the roof and ferns out the window."
Kate Gordon: "I’d choose to go home! My favourite place in the world is the north-west coast of Tasmania, where I grew up."
Lian Tanner: "Paper Beach on the East Tamar. We used to holiday there when I was a kid, and it’s still one of my favourite spots."
Yulan Jack: "Diamond Island off the coast of Bicheno. When the tide is low you can walk to the island across a narrow spit of sand. We visit at least once every summer to swim, read and eat lobster rolls. Don’t get too lost in your book or you might miss low tide and have to swim back!"
Arianne James: "It’s a toss-up between a cosy hut nestled in the Cradle Mountain National Park, or somewhere on the coast. I adore reading on the beach; I’d say a shack anywhere along the Chain of Lagoons or camping on Cooks Beach in Freycinet National Park."
Gan Ainm: "Anywhere in Tasmania is a great place to read!"
Meg Bignell: "The Ship Inn in Stanley, in the depths of winter."
Maggie MacKellar: "Either our shack at Ansons Bay (heaven) or The Ship Inn at Stanley (if money was no object)."
Credit: Blake Lisk
Credit: Jess Bonde