Stephen Downes

I’ve been recently contributing pieces to Pearls & Irritations, a terrific independent website that broadcasts the sorts of commentary and reporting that the populist mainstream media refuse to run these days. P&I calls itself an independent public-policy journal.  It was set up by John Menadue AO, the former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who worked for PMs Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. John was our ambassador to Japan 1977-80, and a former general manager of News …

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Peerless literary critic Peter Craven says my new novel Mural is as ‘variegated and authentic as you could wish for’ in his review in Saturday’s Weekend Australian. In a six-column critique, he achieves the difficult feat of oulining the book’s hugely various elements, the complexities of its linking madness and intellect, urbanity and bewilderment, say. It wasn’t ever something that I aimed for when writing Mural, but Craven has detected the book’s several comic elements, bringing to mind for him …

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On sale for little more than a week, my latest novel Mural is attracting some very flattering reviews. Four positive critiques are online, and they comprehensively summarise the book and its aims better than I can. Rod McLary of the Queensland Reviewers Collective calls Mural a ‘tour-de-force of literary fiction’. Its ‘freshness and imaginative flourish [take the novel] into new territory’, he writes. One of Mural‘s ‘strengths’ is that fact and fiction are ‘seamlessly interwoven’. His last three sentences sum …

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