Canberra authors

…and don’t forget the prolific Robert Macklin.

surprising that John Clanchy isn’t on the list. He won the ACT book of the year a couple years back with ‘the hard word’ and again with ‘vincenco’s garden’ last year – this latter book also picking up a Qld Premier’s Prize.

And with fellow ACT writer, Mark Henshaw, write under the nom de guerre ‘JM Calder’ and have ‘if god sleeps’ and this year’s ‘and hope to die’, two excellent crime-genre tomes.

Susan Marshall’s self-published ‘three summers of bel canto’ is also a local author’s work to get hold of.

Theres a travel book by a guy called Glen Fowler, called Glen goes global. its not the best travel book ever written, but it was distracting enough.

Valerie Parv writes Mills and Boon

Since RiotACTers in general love bashing the Canberra Times, perhaps a few should check out local author Mark Uhlmann’s novel Stink of a journalist.

It may give them a bit more ammo/insight for their attacks.

Mark worked at the Crimes for some time (BTW, he’s also the brother of ABC radio’s chief political correspondent Chris Uhlmann) and the book is a good read, if a bit too dark for some.

Also, surely Jackie French could be considered local? Doesn’t she live somewhere near Bungendore?

I read a couple of Anthony Hill’s young adult books in primary school and even went to a reading by him. Not sure what he’s done recently, but I really enjoyed his novel about a girl who gets stuck inside a grandfather clock — there’s all kinds of greek mythology mixed in as well as some interesting stuff about how clocks work.

I think he or someone else sells his books at the bus depot markets.

Pretty dodgy list — the ACT Writer’s Centre has a longer one, with author profiles etc.

I’ve only read anything by three of them: a dodgy public service thriller by Dorothy Johnston (hated it), a space opera by Maxine McArthur (not bad, by the standards of the genre), and a Geoff Page “verse novel”. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend any of them.

Or given the vast resources they expend on IT they could have a linux box with cpanel loaded on somewhere in a datacentre for less than the cost of a day’s catering at the Assembly and every agency and department could be running their dynamic content on that and mapping it to whatever sub-domain names they can dream up.

so poorly resourced they’ve been forced to use a free blogspot account

I applaud their use of free resources. Expect to see a lot more of this in the future.

You’d think the Gov could spring for a Typepad account at least, with a mapped domain name (ie. library.act.gov.au).