Calla Wahlquist in The Guardian:
The winner of Australia’s richest literary prize did not attend the ceremony.
His absence was not by choice.
Behrouz Boochani, whose debut book won both the $25,000 non-fiction prize at the Victorian premier’s literary awards and the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature on Thursday night, is not allowed into Australia.
The Kurdish Iranian writer is an asylum seeker who has been kept in purgatory on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for almost six years, first behind the wire of the Australian offshore detention centre, and then in alternative accommodation on the island.
Now his book No Friend But the Mountains – composed one text message at a time from within the detention centre – has been recognised by a government from the same country that denied him access and locked him up.
It is, he said, “a paradoxical feeling”.
More here.
In the digital age, reputations made over decades can be lost in minutes. Richard Dawkins first achieved renown as a pioneering evolutionary biologist (through his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene) and, later, as a polemical foe of religion (through 2006’s The God Delusion). Yet he is now increasingly defined by his incendiary tweets, which have been plausibly denounced as Islamophobic.
Michael Jordan, 
Even Che Guevara, the poster boy for the Cuban Revolution, was forced to admit that endlessly trudging the Sierra Maestra mountains had its downsides. “There are periods of boredom in the life of the guerrilla fighter,” he warns future revolutionaries in his classic handbook, Guerrilla Warfare. The best way to combat the dangers of ennui, he helpfully suggests, is reading. Many of the rebels were college educated—Che was a doctor, Fidel a lawyer, others fine art majors—and visitors to the rebels’ jungle camps were often struck by their literary leanings. Even the most macho fighters, it seems, would be seen hunched over books.
On August 15, 1970, Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, gave a speech in New York City where he outlined the Party’s position on two emerging movements at the time, the women’s liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. Newton’s remarks were strikingly unusual since most conservative, moderate, and radical black organizations remained silent on the issues addressed by these movements. The speech appears below.
John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardam’s 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters. Reading this gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of “diplomatic wives”, trailing inebriate husbands through the ruins of empire. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which a small kindness – though not by a diplomatic wife – pays off 40 years later. I must have read it a dozen times, to see how its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung; every time it makes me smile with delight. Hilary Mantel
On a Monday afternoon in December, Sarah Jones, a Tony award-winning playwright and impressionist, sits at a flimsy metal table in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, a cavernous food hall hawking a vast array of cuisine: grass-fed lamb, vegan ramen, tacos, acai bowls. Around her, scruffy workers in baseball caps take their lunches next to corporate types in suits. In a city where the car culture promotes a gas-guzzling form of isolation, the market offers an alternative atmosphere: it buzzes with the energy of happenstance meetings.
Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache produced “a voluminous body of illegible writings.” This phrase from the editors’ brief afterward is in itself so evocative I can hardly go further, that body light and aloft, setting sail on an invisible current of the thoughts beneath words, the feelings beneath skin.
Certainly, even as Cunard’s own work – long overlooked in favour of works about her, including a number of biographies – has recently begun to be recognized and republished, attention has still tended to focus on those of her writings with links to the more outré figures and avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s. Of her poetry, it is the long Parallax (1925), a response to The Waste Land (and, like T. S. Eliot’s poem, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press), that is best known – only partly because it is her best. Meanwhile, her prose, which includes extensive political journalism and several works of memoir, remains largely out of print, and her extensive career as an anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-imperial writer and activist is often characterized as a series of dilettantish enthusiasms.
Jhabvala may have written of Indians, but she wrote largely for the Western Hemisphere. “I have no fans in India,” she 
The trade in ideas, technologies, art and culture between Africa and her partners flowed both ways, a reality that was accentuated by the slavery trade – something that Green explores in great depth. Not only did African goods and commodities pulse through the arteries of the Atlantic world, cultural knowledge and intellectual capital was taken to the New World in the minds of the millions of human beings who were themselves commodified and exchanged. The Maroons, communities of escaped slaves that emerged in Jamaica, Panama and elsewhere, fought their wars using military theories they had learnt on the continent of their birth. Likewise, the rice plantations of South Carolina were cultivated using not just African labour but also African knowledge. This expertise was intentionally transplanted into American soil by British slave traders who had enslaved thousands of people from the rice-growing regions of Sierra Leone. These Africans were kidnapped to order, their minds as valuable a commodity as their bodies.
Edmundson has written an admirably concise yet powerful book. It blends a critical account of Rawls’ work with an original case for democratic socialism hewn from Rawlsian stone. In my opinion, this case has some flaws but it remains a timely contribution to the enduring quest for justice and social stability.
Take a look at the world poverty clock, which shows in real time the fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty. Or consider two recent bestsellers –