The Latest Breaking News from Helen Garner

Judi Dench talking Shakespeare, conversations with bestsellers Marian Keyes and David Nicholls, and a deep dive into the day’s news with Independent journalists and leading thinkers – this year’s Hay Festival programme is fit to burst with unmissable events. Jessie Thompson picks the highlights

The novelist and nonfiction writer on her love of courtroom drama, the trials of cancel culture and why she wouldn’t have been a good psychoanalyst

Among next year’s highlights are debut fiction from Bri Lee, nonfiction from Peter Goldsworthy and a new novel from 2023 Miles Franklin winner Shankari Chandran

She's a 'precarious' academic who still does some acting on the side.

Max Easton’s novel Paradise Estate offers a variation on the share-house drama epitomised by Monkey Grip (1977), Helen Garner’s chronicle of communal living in Melbourne.

Thousands of Australian books have been found on a pirated dataset of ebooks, known as Books3, used to train generative AI. Richard Flanagan, Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Tim Flannery are among the leading local authors affected – along, of course, with writers from around the world.

A descendant of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, this biographical second novel is set among the share houses and squats of a young artistic life

The author’s second novel is impressively constructed, following a young woman who was raised by a group of men beholden to her celebrity mother

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021 at the age of 86, left her readers this “memoir”, Still Pictures, an apt and fascinating coda to a celebrated and provocative life’s work.

In a series of short essays, writers consider what happiness means to them now, after the reckoning of the past few years

A spin on the colonial ‘missing child tale’, a collection of essays dissecting horror and a Miles Franklin nominee’s small masterpiece are among our critics' top picks for the month.