Sydney Writers' Centre blog

Congratulations to Suzanne Smith: Winner of our Matthew Reilly book competition

A big congratulations to Suzanne Smith, who has won the signed copy of Matthew Reilly's The Five Greatest Warriors.

We received a lot of enthusiastic entries, but Suzanne's showed she was true fan of Matthew Reilly's work, and of the adventure and action genre. Her final line actually made us laugh out loud, so we've highlighted it in blue below.

 

Suzanne's response to: What is your favourite Matthew Reilly book?

Seven Ancient Wonders is my favourite novel for a very simple reason - it was my introduction into the world of Matthew Reilly. I bought the book because the blurb indicated the promising premise of a global hunt for ancient treasures. The book was much more than I could have hoped for: an Australian hero leading an international super-team on a race against time to locate treasures guarded by fiendishly clever ancient booby traps. In addition to my love for books I hold a special regard for movies and I was surprised to find that Matthew Reilly somehow managed to deliver a story that satisfied both my passions. I knew I was holding the book in my two, very real, hands but I was also watching an epic action adventure movie. I could practically see Hugh Jackman dodging booby traps, Indiana Jones-style, while wearing Captain Jack West's trademark fireman's helmet. I felt an instant kinship with Matthew Reilly despite knowing nothing about the author at that time. Sure, he obviously had writing and story-telling skills but I saw through that: he was a movie geek. A movie geek giddily combining his two great loves, movies and novels, with intense passion and force as though he thought at any minute someone would realise he’s having too much fun and make him put down his pen.  

Though I may have felt a kinship with Matthew Reilly when I first read   Seven Ancient Wonders, the moment I found out he owned a Delorean (a la Back To The Future) I knew I was in love. Fast forward a few years and my bookcase now holds his entire back catalogue and I feverishly await each new book like an addict waits for their next hit.Owning a signed copy of The Five Greatest Warriors would   probably blow my mind but I promise I won't hold the Sydney Writers'  Centre  liable for medical damages.

 

We're mailing out your signed copy of The Five Greatest Warriors, and are delighted we wont be held liable for your brain explosion. Enjoy it!

Author, activist and lawyer Larissa Behrendt named NSW Australian of the Year.

Big congratulations are in order for Larissa Behrendt who was awarded the NSW Australian of the Year award on last week, on the 25th of November, 2010 . For those of you not familiar with Behrendt's work, she is a law professor at UTS, passionate advocate for Australian reconciliation and indigenous rights, and has written a number of books, including the highly-acclaimed and heart-twisting novel Home.

Larissa Behrendt was recognised for her tireless commitment to her vision of a better Australia, through her work as a law professor at UTS, her advocacy and her writing.

Now is a great time to read Home, so bump it to the top of your to-read list and try and complete it by Australia day, when the National Australian of the Year is announced.

Popular Facebook Note on the “best” 100 books

A friend of mine tagged me in this Facebook note over the weekend, confirming my suspicion that my book-nerdiness is becoming increasingly obvious. This note that has been doing the rounds for almost a year now, and it is probably based on the 2009 BBC booklist. We were struck by how many notable exclusions, and questionable inclusions, there are on this list.

For example, why is The Picture of Dorian Gray not on the list? Why are the Narnia series, and the individual The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe both on the list?

What do you think of the list? How many of these books have you read? Which books are missing? I’ve gone through and followed the instructions of the note, and would love to hear which ones you have read in the comments section.

The Facebook Note:

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicise the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!
 
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez **
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

How many of these have you read? Are your favourite books on this list?

Student Success: Jane Rowley receives an OPSO Media Award for her article

There is nothing quite as exciting as sliding into your chair on a Monday morning, opening your email and finding one titled “Award winning writer thanks to you!”

Jane Rowley did a course with us back in April 2010, and this was her email:

“Some exciting news.

Last Monday night I flew to Brisbane to collect a national writing prize.  The OPSO Media Awards recognise "excellence in reporting positive ageing in the over 50s."  I won the category 'National Magazine feature article' for a piece I wrote for Australian Pilot entitled High Flying Investment... The national awards have been running since 1993.
 
I'd like to thank you for your professional courses and your high standards. You are truly helping people find their writing voices and providing a very real path to a successful writing career.”

Congratulations, Jane! We look forward to hearing more about your writing successes.

Unleash Your Inner Travel Writer - for free flights!

The idea of getting paid to write about your travels, and getting paid to travel is a dream of many, many of our students, whether they're studying the travel writing courses, or feature writing ones. So much so that we're running a travel writing trip to Lucca, Tuscany for the first time next year.

So we were very excited when we discovered this Jetstar competition that awards a return flight for you and a friend, in exchange for your favourite travel story in 600 words. The return flight is to anywhere in the Jetstar network, and there will be a winner drawn every day until February 1st next year.

The only catch is that you need to have flown Jetstar on that trip, but I'm sure many of us have so get writing!

NEWS: Matthew Reilly Book Give Away

Matthew Reilly is one of Australia's most successful authors, and has a repetoire of 9 published books, an international following and his name in big letters on his books. He also has one of the most successful self-publishing stories around, from turning up with his box of his first book Conquest to book shops and selling them at the bar he worked at during uni.

We had the opportunity to talk at length with Matthew last week about his writing career and advice for aspiring authors, and you can watch the video and read the full transcript here.

We have a signed copy of his latest release The Five Greatest Warriors to give away to a very lucky newsletter subscriber. This could make a perfect Christmas gift – if you can bear to give it away!

 
It began with six stones. Jack West Jr and his loyal team are in desperate disarray: they’ve been separated and their mission is in tatters, and Jack was last seen plummeting down a fathomless abyss.
 
After surviving his deadly fall, Jack must now race against his many enemies to locate and set in place the remaining pieces of The Machine before the coming Armageddon.
 
As the world teeters on the brink of destruction, Jack will learn of the Five Warriors, the individuals who throughout history have been most intimately connected to his quest.

If you’d like a chance to win this very special prize, just tell us what your favourite Matthew Reilly book is, and why. (Or tell us about your favourite thriller/adventure book.)

Email your answers to courses@spindriftmedia.com.au by Friday 26 November 2010 and don’t forget to include your postal address.

If you are not currently subscribed to the newsletter you can do so here so you can enter the competition.

Matthew Reilly at the Sydney Writers' Centre

We had a very special guest at the Centre recently. Publishing phenomenon Matthew Reilly dropped by to chat to us about his incredible writing journey, and his latest book, The Five Greatest Warriors.

It’s hard to talk about Australian publishing and not mention Matthew Reilly. From self-published author to international bestseller, his books continue to enthral readers of all ages.

His first book, Contest, was self-published in 1996. After being knocked back by every major publisher in Sydney, he produced 1,000 copies of Contest himself, and eventually won a publishing deal with Pan Macmillan.

His first book with Pan Macmillan was Ice Station, followed by Contest and Temple. Among the 7 books published since then are Hell Island (one of four in the Shane Schofield series), The Five Greatest Warriors (book 3 of the Jack West series) and Hover Car Racer, a book that was originally published online and read by over 180,000 people – for free!

Matt Reilly’s books have been published in over 20 countries and sold over 3.5 million copies. Some of his books have also been optioned for film.

In this video Matthew is interviewed by Sydney Writers’ Centre presenter Geoff Bartlett.

Click play to watch the full video interview.
Duration: 44 minutes.

If you'd like to read the transcript visit our website, or you can download the audio podcast from iTunes.

If you're interested in self-publishing your own book, check out our Self-Publishing: How to do it seminar with Geoff Bartlett.


Matthew Reilly Book Giveaway
We have a signed copy of his latest release The Five Greatest Warriors to give away to a very lucky newsletter subscriber. This could make a perfect Christmas gift – if you can bear to give it away!

 
It began with six stones. Jack West Jr and his loyal team are in desperate disarray: they’ve been separated and their mission is in tatters, and Jack was last seen plummeting down a fathomless abyss.
 
After surviving his deadly fall, Jack must now race against his many enemies to locate and set in place the remaining pieces of The Machine before the coming Armageddon.
 
As the world teeters on the brink of destruction, Jack will learn of the Five Warriors, the individuals who throughout history have been most intimately connected to his quest.

If you’d like a chance to win this very special prize, just tell us what your favourite Matthew Reilly book is, and why. (Or tell us about your favourite thriller/adventure book) Email your answers to courses [at] spindriftmedia [dot] com [dot] au by Friday 26 November 2010 and don’t forget to include your postal address.

To enter you must be a subscriber to our free weekly newsletter. If you are not currently subscribed to the newsletter you can do so here.

Sydney Writers’ Centre sponsoring writing competition with My Child mag

If you have a creative short story of around 900 words about pregnancy, birth or the first five years of raising a child, then you should enter it in the  My Child/Parenting Express writing competition for great prizes and to get published!

The winning story will be published in My Child Autumn edition and we’ve donated part of the winner’s prize, a course voucher for the Feature Writing For Newspapers and Magazines course worth $395.

The Spring edition of My Child is out soon, or you can visit their website here.

Can Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" ever spawn an authentic film version of itself?

The Great Gatsby was my first ever favourite book. Beloved by thousands of writers and readers who have careened through this short novel of delicate sentences, impossible descriptions and odd characters, this story also retains the much-coveted relevance of cultural commentary. So I was very excited when I heard that there was a new movie being developed, starring Leonardo Dicaprio as Gatsby and directed by Australia's very own Baz Luhrman. I'm especially looking forward to seeing how Luhrman tackles the gorgeous descriptions.

However, is a film version of The Great Gatsby ever going to do justice to the original text? This article by Sarah Churchill in the UK Guardian mounts a strong case for a resounding "no". She argues that the essential vagueness and the critical symbolic nature of the characters can never be transformed into a film version that doesn't cheapen the very elements that make the book so memorable.

A snippet of the article:

"Gatsby is littered with words that disavow storytelling: "uncommunicable", "unusually communicative in a reserved way", the "unutterable", the "unknowable"."

I'd love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to share them in the comments section, or on our Facebook page.

 

“The country comes to the city” with Live Poets @ Don Bank

For those of you who love poetry and live over on the north side of Sydney, there is a new event on at Don Bank next Wednesday, the 24th of November for the annual presentation of the UnDarwin Awards..
 
Jim Low will be launching his new folk album Above the Creek Bed and he will be followed by bush poet and social satirist Brian Bell, who will regale attendees with the country take on contemporary society.

As always, there will be the $7 supper, drinks and an open section for anyone who wishes to recite, sing or play an instrument or tell a story – with the loose theme of “Poems of Your Blood’s Country”.

Details:
Wednesday 7.30pm, November 24th
Live Poets @ Don Bank
6 Napier St North Sydney
Further info: Danny Gardner (02) 9896 6956 Mobile 0422 263 373or at dannylivepoets@yahoo.com.au