“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?

Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).

The poem features in On Memoir, as an example of how form can be used against the grain of expectations to talk about traumatic collective experiences; Morrison also points to As If, his exploration of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the 10-year-olds who had killed the two-year-old James Bulger. Life writing, then, doesn’t always mean your own life, and almost never only yours. So how do you do it?

Morrison’s response is a deceptively breezy alphabetically ordered guide, with Flashbacks, Food and Footnotes giving way to Persona, Photos and Plagiarism, and so forth. There’s plenty of cheerfully nuts-and-bolts advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: the most pedestrian example might be not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising not to write off self-publishing if you really want to get your story out there. The book also functions as a terrific reading list, encompassing titles from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, through Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the work of Annie Ernaux to, more recently, Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, a memoir of growing up that also found itself compelled by Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes.

But the most insistent questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never quite resolving. Chief among them is: does it have to be true? Memory, after all, is a slippery customer, and although the contemporary exhortation to “speak one’s truth” might appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their truth too. When accounts of events and their associated emotions and conclusions are contested, things can get messy quickly.

Should a committed life writer worry about what other people think? Morrison hedges his bets a touch: one should be as truthful as possible, and certainly not fabricate entire histories in order to deceive and manipulate (see Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiences of the Holocaust). But neither can writers allow themselves to be self-seduced by the desire to be likable, or to quail from excavating experiences that are painful or embarrassing. You can’t mind too much, either, if your old school friend is cheesed off because you inaccurately remembered seeing his brother on a train (as happened to Morrison), although you should practice human decency when you’re revealing your father’s love affairs (also Morrison).

One of the most intriguing consequences of his A-Z approach is that you start to add your own entries. Between Likability and Loss, I wondered, wasn’t there a place for Loneliness? Not simply as a way to understand why people might want to write about their own histories, but to grasp why so many of us read them? Poring over the minute details of another’s life isn’t the same as befriending them, but can it make one feel – to use another telling contemporary term – “seen”? Maybe that should be under N for Nosiness.

‘He was after me. Always had been. Why else would he target me months ago? Infiltrate my flat, my supposed safe space? Question was, what did he want from me. Who, for that matter, did I mean by me?” Isabel Waidner’s fifth novel, As If, opens with the meeting of two bedraggled strangers, Aubrey and Lindsey. Lindsey has materialised on Aubrey’s doorstep and Aubrey has asked him in, noting with pained curiosity how alike they look. “He had dark brown hair not unlike mine,” Aubrey tells us. “My unremarkable eyes they were looking back at me.” With this unsettling opener, the tone is set for a disquieting read, one that I found all the more uncanny as it overlaps so unnervingly with my own new book, Lean Cat, Savage Cat.

Both books draw their protagonists from the lower rungs of showbiz, both utilise the language of fashion in deliberately off-putting ways, both bring the sybaritic myths of artistic life into direct conflict with the realities of housing insecurity and wage instability. Both novels look at how unprocessed grief can fracture the psyche, and – crucially – they both centre on a mysterious pair of doubles. They were also published on the same day. All of which prompts me to ask: does my book have its own doppelganger?

From spyware as standard, to the conspiracy theorists who insist that Melania Trump has been replaced by an impersonator, we are in a deeply paranoid moment. I know I’m not alone in experiencing the creepy feeling that things aren’t quite as they seem. Fittingly, the figure of the doppelganger stalks right across contemporary culture, through books, fashion and film.

The double has haunted screens since the earliest days of cinema, appearing first in The Student of Prague (1913) and then in titles such as Rebecca, Vertigo and Black Swan. More recent horror films The Substance and Get Out have put a new spin on things, mining themes of identity and celebrity. Sinners, with its twin brothers both played by Michael B Jordan, won three Baftas last month and Famous, which stars Zac Efron as a Hollywood heart-throb and his obsessive lookalike fan, is now in post-production.

On the runway, Kate Moss’s dead ringer, Denise Ohnona, walks in shows and fronts campaigns “as” Kate, while H&M has created Al “twins” of real models for their ads. At Berlin fashion week, GmbH presented an autumn/winter collection called Doppelgänger.

This spectral figure is all over contemporary fiction, too. In Deborah Levy’s August Blue, a concert pianist is stalked by shadow selves. In Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang, a thieving writer is trolled online by the ghost of the girl who really wrote her book. In Tobi Coventry’s new release He’s the Devil, a down-at-heel waiter ogles a new roommate who is also a body-hopping demon.

Zoom out from the arts and we see similar phenomena. Dupe culture is flourishing, with shoppers talking excitedly about how easily (and cheaply) they can buy products that aren’t explicitly fake, but rather imitations of the original. The copy is developing an independent currency. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re also experiencing a bumper crop of what may politely be called political doublespeak. Empty promises to deliver for ordinary working people mask a policy of siphoning wealth to the world’s richest men, and freedom of speech has become a strategy for the powerful to silence and harass minorities. Not to mention Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace, launched shortly after Pete Hegseth’s rebranded Department of War.

Online, we’re equipped with our digital doubles, posting filtered photos of curated lives we aren’t actually leading. But this is only our public face. Most people use Instagram’s “close friends” setting, too, and many also have a secondary “finsta” (fake Instagram) designed to share content considered too personal.

Yet as we fragment on the internet, we are at the same time being cloned. Data mining allows big tech to effectively generate a second self for each internet user in order to track their behaviour and better target their ads. On dating apps, catfishing is rife: users upload other people’s photos or generate entirely fake profiles, whether from a sense of insecurity or for more sinister reasons. The increasing prevalence of online conspiracies and the attendant fixations with body doubles and false flag attacks express the same underlying unease. As Naomi Klein put it: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”

Offline, aestheticians relentlessly pioneer new ways for us all to look beautifully identical. It seems as though, every week, another famous woman steps out on the red carpet, soft-launching a new face that makes her look just like every other famous woman. A nose as distinctive as Anjelica Huston’s or a smile like Shelley Duvall’s is now refashioned into something much more restrained: a face capable of advertising handbags or mouthing second-screen dialogue. Such procedures are no longer the exclusive provenance of Hollywood stars, either. The spectacle of the Mar-a-Lago face shows how among civilians, too, this deliberately artificial look is spawning infinite duplicate countenances.

Yet this world of endless doubling is not new. The doppelganger first appeared in Jean Paul’s novel Siebenkäs, published in three volumes between 1796 and 1797, and has been with us as an almost constant companion since. From gothic touchstones such as Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to modern classics such as Nabokov’s Despair and Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, the double has outpaced every trend and appears in just about every genre.

In these novels, the double frequently functions as the embodiment of unacceptable, inexpressible desires and impulses. Brontë gives Jane Eyre an anima figure, in the form of Bertha Mason, a shadow self capable of expressing what Jane cannot. Conversely, the doppelganger of Poe’s licentious William Wilson tries to prevent him from committing further acts of wickedness – but ends up dead. In Hogg’s dual narrative, the repressed and righteous protagonist, Robert, is led to damnation by the devil, who appears as his exact likeness.

Other writers have sought to repurpose the double as something other than sublimation gone awry. Nabokov’s protagonist Hermann is convinced that the man he shoots dead is his double. Unfortunately, the two look nothing alike and Despair is ultimately a novel about being blind to the truth. The anti-hero of Spark’s Ballad of Peckham Rye, Dougal Douglas (who sometimes goes by Douglas Dougal), is his own double. He is in Peckham not to show people the true colour of their souls nor do their dirty work for them, but rather to sow chaos amid their dreams and aspirations. The double is now such a recognisable stock character as to be endlessly malleable.

Freud’s seminal essay Das Unheimliche (1919) posited this nightmare figure as the product of our inability to fully grasp our own mortality. The eternal soul and its promise of everlasting life allows us to overcome the fear of death, Freud writes. Only this fear returns to haunt us in mirror images, twins and, of course, the doppelganger.

I was freaked out by reading As If because it seemed to say that in spite of what I know to have been the process, Waidner and I were at work on the same project at the same time. Maybe they were standing over my shoulder as I wrote (or I over theirs). Perhaps we’re the same person.

Such paranoias may have once been accommodated by a worldview that encompassed witchcraft, phantoms and fortunetellers. Today, what do we have but corporate espionage and data leaks to explain the sinister feeling that someone else is looking back at us each time we unlock our phone with face ID? Our multiple digital identities can only help us escape so far. Our fears and paranoias will always chase us. Movies and books will doubtless remain populated with doubles – and when the boogeyman finally puts his hand on our shoulder, well, he’s going to look just like us.

Evelyn Araluen has won both the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 Indigenous writing category at this year’s Victorian premier’s literary awards, for her second poetry collection The Rot.

Selected from almost 700 books entered for the prize, The Rot won the two awards on Thursday night, having also been shortlisted in the poetry category. The Goorie and Koori poet won the 2022 Stella prize, and was shortlisted for three premier’s literary prizes, for her debut collection Dropbear.

Speaking before she was aware she had also won the overall prize, Araluen told Guardian Australia she was “excited” to have won the $25,000 Indigenous writing category. Asked if she felt she might have a chance at the top prize, she replied: “Oh God no, I’m not getting a look in at that. I’ll be quite comfortable with my prize, thank you.”

The judges called The Rot “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising” and “a vital intervention in this country’s cultural conversation.” It was written in the span of a few months last year, and was inspired by her experience reading two poems at Adelaide writers’ week in 2024, where she was heckled for referring to Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide on stage.

“These poems were about witnessing a genocide and the feeling of inertia and grief and rage and passivity that sits in the body when you feel so powerless against our government’s complicity in that genocide,” Araluen said. “I had people get up and leave and shout at me and have a go at me … I shouted back and felt so enraged. But I had incredibly beautiful people coming up to me afterwards, some of them crying, saying the poems had helped them understand how they have been feeling.”

After she won the Stella for Dropbear, Araluen spoke about how she had been “one paycheck away from complete poverty”, juggling multiple temporary jobs in the arts while working on her debut. She has since taken a full-time job as an academic, which she said initially “felt like a compromise” but had “allowed me the safety to be able to write more.”

She worked on The Rot “after work, after dinner, in the bath” for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was “irresponsible of me.”

“I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,” she added.

The Rot reflects “a really panicked, distressed window of a time, that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,” Araluen said.

“I tried to make sure that the book very clearly documented that we knew what was happening in our names and we did not stop it,” she added. “I hope that this book dates. I hope it reads as incredibly naive and doesn’t catch a glimpse of the political ambitions that are going to be realised in the future. But if it doesn’t, I want it to be a record of a very, very uncomfortable truth that we’re all going to have to live with.”

Araluen also called on the Australian government to reform the way arts prizes are taxed. Some, like the prime minister’s literary awards, are tax-free, but most, including the Stella and all the state premier literary awards, are taxed as income.

“Winning the Stella prize was really fantastic but it was taxed at nearly 50%,” she said. “When you spend sometimes years of your life working on something, and you have good fortune that you can’t have possibly planned for or anticipated, the impact of a prize can sometimes be quite disruptive financially.”

“Other countries have really intelligent taxation laws that allow artists to continue working in periods of heightened prosperity versus significantly lower incomes. This is not me saying, I don’t believe in tax. Obviously tax is incredibly important. But a lot of people assumed I must suddenly be rich after the Stella, and once you take out tax and Hecs debts and I needed to get my teeth fixed and we had used our superannuation to survive Covid … we don’t really have the advantage of solid, sustainable investment we can rely on.”

In other categories at the Victorian premier’s literary awards, this year’s $2,000 people’s choice award went to Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah, the Australian-Palestinian academic who was controversially dumped from this year’s Adelaide writers’ week, a decision that triggered the collapse of the annual literary event.

Omar Musa won the fiction prize for his novel Fierceland, about two siblings from Malaysian Borneo who must grapple with the legacy of their father, a palm-oil baron, after his death. The judges praised the novel’s “glittering prose and sweeping, ambitious form”.

The nonfiction prize went to Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Australian-Palestinian writer Micaela Sahhar, which the judges described as “a remarkable debut memoir that is simultaneously a work of poetry in its lyricism and feeling.”

The children’s literature category was won by Zeno Sworder for his picture book Once I Was a Giant. The young adult prize was renamed the John Marsden prize this year, in tribute to the famed young adult author who died in December 2024; it was won by Margot McGovern for her horror novel This Stays Between Us.

The poetry prize went to Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada for her collection KONTRA, playwright Emilie Collyer won the drama category for her play Super, and the prize for an unpublished manuscript went to The Kookaburra by Charlotte Guest.

The Victorian premier’s literary awards have been running since 1985.

2026 Victorian premier’s literary awards: winners list

Victorian prize for literature: The Rot by Evelyn Araluen

Fiction: Fierceland by Omar Musa

Non-fiction: Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Micaela Sahhar

Poetry: KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

Drama: Super by Emilie Collyer

Indigenous writing: The Rot by Evelyn Araluen

Children’s literature: Once I Was a Giant by Zeno Sworder

John Marsden prize for writing for young adults: This Stays Between Us by Margot McGovern

Unpublished manuscript: The Kookaburra by Charlotte Guest

People’s choice award: Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah

The literary journal Meanjin will return to the city it was born in that bears its Indigenous name.

The Queensland University of Technology announced on Wednesday it had acquired the 85-year-old journal, whose life was cut short by Melbourne University Press in September.

QUT’s successful bid marked a full circle for Meanjin, which was founded in Brisbane/Meanjin by Clem Christesen in 1940 before moving to Melbourne in 1945.

The QUT vice-chancellor, Prof Margaret Sheil, said the new ownership agreement committed to maintaining the journal’s rigorous standards by safeguarding its editorial independence and the appointment of a dedicated editorial board.

“Meanjin has been instrumental in shaping Australian literary and intellectual culture for decades,” Sheil said. “It has provided a vital platform for critical discussion, a showcase of emerging writers and a valuable training ground for leading Australian publishers and editors. We are honoured to be entrusted with the legacy of this cultural icon.”

A competitive nationwide search will be launched to recruit a new editor.

Rob Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a blackly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer named Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see him as a sexually pent-up teacher abroad, masturbating over an essay he’s marking. That the scene is an echo of one in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (once named by Doyle as the best book from the past 40 years) hardly lessens our discomfort, and it’s hard not to feel that our unease is precisely the point. “Frankly, a lot of my life has been disastrous,” he once told an interviewer – which might not be quite as self-deprecating as it sounds, given that Doyle has also argued that “great literature” is born of “abjection” not “glory”.

The autofictional game-playing continues in his new novel, Cameo, but instead of self-abasing display, we get a perky book-world send-up for the culture war era, cartoonishly dramatising the ups and downs of creative life. It takes the form of a vertiginous hall of mirrors centred on gazillion-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duka, renowned for a long novel cycle drawn on his own life, the summaries of which comprise the bulk of the book we’re reading. Duka’s work isn’t autofiction à la Knausgård: hardly deskbound, still less under the yoke of domesticity, he leads a jet-set life of peril, mixing with drug dealers, terrorists, spies, and eventually serving time for tax evasion before he develops a crack habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris and – perhaps least likely of all – returns to his long-forsaken Catholicism.

Writerly pettiness is an ever-present source of comedy: abducted in Iraq (long story), Duka finds himself recording propaganda for Islamic State, during which he has the presence of mind to denounce “his literary rivals, including writers barely known beyond Dublin publishing circles”. Punctuating the action are free-floating monologues from voices recalling their connection to Duka, including an actor bitter about no longer playing him on screen, a punk novelist akin to Virginie Despentes, and – naturally – one Rob Doyle. There are excerpts, too, from the memoir of an unnamed author recalling his boyhood breakthrough of writing a story in the voice of the Predator (“It just hadn’t occurred to me before that I could enter the sensorium of an extraterrestrial psychopath”); plus – on top of all that – snippets from a near-future novel about a cab driver in a time of pan-European war, alien sightings and “cartel leaders in Mexico worshipping a new AI”.

Away from our anticipation as to how these strands fit together, Cameo’s energy lies largely in that sort of larky detail, narrated in a winningly deadpan register caught between bewilderment and weariness. The matter-of-fact present-tense narration, sprightly with hyperbolic intensifiers (he’s especially fond of “satanic”), generates terrific momentum and the satire is wicked. At one point, Duka – reinventing himself as an anti-woke comedian – is in demand as a rightwing talking head: “Whenever an interlocutor, invariably in firmer command of facts and statistics, seems poised to get the better of him, Ren accuses them of racism. If he feels he is in a particularly tight corner, he accuses them of paedophilia … Two months after his stand-up tour ends, he writes an article for the New Statesman titled ‘I’m Sorry’.”

While I frequently lost track of whether I was reading the life of the fictitious author Ren Duka or the story of what his fictional avatar gets up to in the novels written by him, you might take that as a mark of the immersion generated by Cameo’s conceit. It’s not all laughs, either; there’s a kernel of emotion when, on the brink of drug-induced breakdown in Berlin, “Rob Doyle” rings his sister for help – but she’s still unhappy because of her portrayal in a previous book, and the call ends disastrously when, deep in his own plight, he’s oblivious to hers.

Overall, though, such moments are rarer than in Threshold and Doyle’s 2022 memoir Autobibliography, as if he wanted a break from hanging himself out to dry as the bad guy. But that only makes this slippery jeu d’esprit harder to pin down. Is Duka’s improbably storied narrative – the writer as action hero, a fantasy of literary celebrity – a comic riposte to the accusation that autofiction looks no further than its own navel? Whatever the case, I suspect some readers will hate it – but also that Doyle wouldn’t want it any other way.

Eva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet” novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.”

From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight”. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Judith Butler’s theories of gender are buttressed by a deft analysis of Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish hero of the Rutshire chronicles by the late, great Jilly Cooper.

One of Risbridger’s favourites is The Pisces by Melissa Broder, in which the heroine falls in love, and lust, with a merman. Risbridger recalls discussing it excitedly with her friends, not least the bit where the heroine has to push her fish/boyfriend hybrid around on a trolley. This last plot point is an obvious stumbling block for anyone looking to romantic fiction for real-life inspiration, and there are plenty of them: in the year that Fifty Shades of Grey took off there was a two-thirds increase in admissions to US emergency units for kink-related accidents.

A even more unlikely pairing occurs in Unhinged, by Vera Valentine, in which Tana, the human heroine, starts getting it on with her front door. (Sample dialogue: “I am your door, and I love you”). On taking flesh-and-blood form, however, the door reveals itself to be the son of Zeus, which neatly backs up one of Risbridger’s main points: that the templates of romance narrative are as old as the gods. Knowledge of the classical world is clearly desirable when confronted with a lover who insists on showing up disguised as a white bull, the North Wind or, indeed, a household fixture.

It is this shape-shifting quality that Risbridger celebrates as one of the genre’s great pleasures, arguing that there is “something inherently bisexual – or more properly, pansexual in the fluidity of romantic fiction”. Sometimes the author bakes same-sex attraction into her text: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca positively thrums with the eroticised spark between the first and second Mrs De Winter, mediated by the permanently a-simmer housekeeper Mrs Danvers. More subtle, although more powerful, are those works where the queer attraction is coded or unconscious, lying in wait to be made use of by an attentive reader.

To demonstrate what she means, Risbridger offers an analysis of one of her favourite tropes of romantic fiction: the love rival. The love rival is the pitch-perfect woman who appears, at least in the early chapters, to offer the hero everything that his alpha-male heart could desire. She is pretty, rich, clever, all without seeming to try too hard. This is in direct contrast to the heroine, who is full of unrequited longing, self-doubt and a touch of body dysmorphia. Celebrated love rivals include Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice or Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre and, for pages at a time, she is all that the heroine can think about.

This may seem like small beer as far as same-sex passion goes, but bear in mind that Mills & Boon did not publish an explicitly queer title until 2020. Instead, the fluidity of the romance genre has allowed endless retellings of canonical novels, each becoming edgier than the last. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction based on the Twilight series, which in turn was a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by way of Anne Rice’s lusciously camp vampire books. In the course of this lengthy metamorphosis, desire gets diverted, queered, kinked and set free to roam where it will. And it is this quality of loving lawlessness, suggests Risbridger, that gives romantic fiction its deep joy and special pleasure.

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I had been working on Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry project for two years when the invitation came to travel to the country’s largest literary festival. I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a journey to a war zone, but I was assured that visiting BookForum in Lviv, a city so far west it’s practically in Poland, would be safe. I had been leading poetry workshops with exiles and editing translations of Ukrainian poetry, including soldier Artur Dron‘’s collection We Were Here, published last November. So, when Artur and his translator – the incredible poet Yuliya Musakovska – asked me and language professor Hugh Roberts to attend, I couldn’t say no.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the city: its gorgeous architecture, its cafes, its parks full of trees, and its writers. Lviv’s inspired, robust literary culture puts the UK’s own underfunded, last-gasp scene to shame. On the first night of the Forum, Hugh and I attended a nonstop music and poetry event in a nightclub at which both Artur and Yuliya read their poems, and revealed what utter rock stars they truly are. I don’t know why I was surprised; We Were Here, written on the frontline before Artur was even 22, is a masterpiece. It is full of lucid, clear-eyed accounts of his experiences in the trenches and on the battlefield, elegies for his comrades, humane portraits of the suffering of bereaved civilians and furious adaptations of liturgies and prayers. One of his poems is published below.

The next day, Yuliya and I read our own poems together, and then Hugh and I were hustled off to meet the mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi. We watched a presentation about the Unbroken Institute, an enormous hospital development in the Lviv region dedicated to the rehabilitation of casualties. It includes world-leading prosthetics design facilities, physiological and psychological care units, and maternity wards. It is always augmenting, preparing for casualties yet to come and the long-term legacy of this war, its manifold trauma.

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When, on day two of the book festival, a siren sounds, it is so soft, so unlike the ear-splitting sirens of my RAF childhood, that at first I think it’s a drill. Then comes a recording of a man who tells us, in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard, that there is an air raid and we must seek shelter.

I pull a jumper on over my pyjamas and make my way down to the shelter – a staff kitchen area in the basement. Slowly other people filter in, including a family with two children who are shown into a room which I hope has beds. Children all over the city are listening to the sounds of this murderous sky. It turns out to be the worst bombardment Lviv has yet suffered.

Under the migraine-inducing strip lights, everyone huddles over their phones, watching the trajectories of the Russian missiles on Telegram channels such as War Monitor – red, green and yellow lines pointing straight at Lviv. My new shelter buddy Bartosz has an app that delivers blow-by-blow updates, including a meme of a furiously smoking monkey to indicate there is time between missiles for a quick cigarette. This is war in a digital age. Hugh receives a text to say that two Russian Kinzhal missiles are coming and, sure enough, I hear and feel them. Down here they sound like plosives (“puh … puh”) rather than explosives, and a muted tremor comes up through the soles of my feet. I am afraid of what is happening above ground, and fervently grateful to the defence units trying to shoot down the drones.

It would be easy to say that when I tentatively step out the next day, there is only a faint whiff of burnt rubber, that repairs have already begun, that Lviv is unbroken. Yet energy infrastructure has been targeted, boding a cold winter; a six-year-old boy has suffered a traumatic brain injury; a whole family have been killed including Anastasiia Hrytsiv – the same age as my daughter, the same long hair and bright smile. Just that night she had been texting her father on the frontline, checking he was OK.

The BookForum is in full fuck-you-Putin mode, defiantly thriving, and I wander through stalls piled high with exquisitely produced books and wonder at the richness of book culture here. Our last event is a bilingual reading with three soldier poets, Dron’, Ihor Mitrov and Fedir Rudyi. I read the English versions of Fedir’s poems; they are tender, grounded and as acutely observant and sensitive as Fedir is in person.

After the reading, the three poets hold each other. They are all in pain. These war poems are hard to read, and all three of them have injuries, psychological and – in Artur’s case – physical: nerve damage in his left arm inflicted by a Russian drone. A red scar wipes out a section of his beautiful sleeve tattoo of trees. He is still receiving rehabilitation treatment at the Unbroken Institute. Many of his friends – also terrific poets – have been killed, including the incredible Maksym Kryvtsov.

Beloved poets, beloved city, I am praying for an end to Russian aggression, I am wishing you safe from harm.

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Prayer by Artur Dron’

Translated from the Ukrainian by Yuliya Musakovska

With the swimmers, swim,
with the travellers, travel,
as they say in church.

With the one who was raped
and is expecting a child,
breathe, breathe, breathe.
With the child whose hair has gone grey,
prepare a backpack for school.

With the frostbitten, freeze,
with the shellshocked, vomit in the trench.
With the tank commander,
who’s been missing since October,
be found, be pieced together
from scattered body parts.
Consecrated particles
as they say in church.

And also be
with the one who eats pot noodles with cold water;
with the one who was captured but will never talk;
with the one who was conceived
but didn’t get born.
And be with the one
who didn’t get to give birth.

And also be
with the two girls
somewhere in the Rivne region, do you remember?
We were driving to the east, in a convoy,
and they stood watching at the roadside,
and put their hands on their hearts.

And then I understood everything.

• Prayer is taken from We Were Here by Artur Dron’, published by Jantar. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

When Siang Lu found out he’d won the Miles Franklin literary award, he had a physical reaction. “I was in such shock that I lost all feeling in my hands and legs,” the Brisbane-based author says. “I teared up. I lost my voice a little bit. It was the first time in my life that I’ve ever had to ask someone with a straight face, ‘Can you just please confirm to me that I’m not dreaming?’”

The feeling Lu describes is akin to the surreal nature of his experimental, prize-winning novel, Ghost Cities. Set between modern and ancient times, and inspired by the vacant megacities of China, the sprawling, ambitious novel is shot through with absurdist humour, cultural commentary and satire in what the Miles Franklin judges describe as “at once a grand farce and a haunting meditation on diaspora”, and “a genuine landmark in Australian literature”.

Accepting the awards in Sydney a few days after speaking to the Guardian, Lu said the book – finished ten years ago – had been rejected more than 200 times in Australia and abroad.

“I used to print my rejections and Blu-Tack them onto the glass pane between my office and my bedroom. My youngest child … had just been born. She is nine now, and she would nap on that big bed while I worked and kept an eye on her. And the rejections kept piling up. Eventually, they grew so numerous that I could no longer see through the glass into the bedroom where my daughter slept,” Lu said on Thursday night.

“This was a hard moment for me, because if things continued in this manner … I would quite literally lose sight of the important thing. This book and its difficult journey into being taught me how to be a man, because I finally understood in that moment how to make sense of my failures,” he went on.

“I decided I would continue writing. Because to not write would be worse.”

Many of Ghost Cities’ characters, from emperors to civilians, are devoted to telling, and preserving, stories. It’s something Lu hadn’t realised until a keen-eyed reader pointed it out – now, he says it’s key to the novel itself and the $60,000 prize he’s just won.

“I think people are responding to a combination of the humour, which I care very deeply about, but also the idea that we should venerate art, storytellers and storytelling,” he says.

“Amongst the cast of characters in Ghost Cities … It was the storytellers that had any hope of claiming agency … I hope that at some subconscious level, this is what readers and the judging panel might have responded to: the love for storytelling and literature.”

Like many of Australia’s most acclaimed writers, Lu works a full-time job (in tech) and has two children, aged nine and 11. Some of Ghost Cities was written many years ago on his hour-long commute to and from the office.

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“From the outside in normal, real life, it might appear that in some ways, I’ve de-prioritised literature in my life: I work a normal job, try to be as present as I can for my children, do what I can for the community,” he says. “But in fact, secretly, I’ve put literature above everything.”

Ghost Cities is Lu’s second novel and follows 2022’s The Whitewash, a madcap, satirical oral history blending real and fictional stories of Hollywood’s race problem. An online project, The Beige Index (described as “the Bechdel test for race”), is a companion piece of sorts.

The perennially shy author says it was a “gift” for this to be his debut in the Australian literary world, because it meant “I could be an advocate for something that I care about very deeply, which was more and better representation – that very quickly became like armour for me. I thought, ‘Let me be a good advocate for this cause, and then I don’t need to talk about myself,’ which is a win-win.”

This year Lu was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin alongside Brian Castro (Chinese Postman), Michelle de Kretser (Theory and Practice), Winnie Dunn (Dirt Poor Islanders), Julie Janson (Compassion) and Fiona McFarlane (Highway 13). He observes that prize shortlists have become more diverse. “I don’t think that is possible without people behind the scenes, the judges themselves, the readers who are reading critically and thinking about these questions: where are we, where are we going, and how do we get there?” he says.

But the author also believes it is, first and foremost, about the work itself: “I’ve been in judging panels and session groups … [In] the conversations about whose voices we want to champion, always, always, the first cornerstone to that is quality.”

The writing community matters a lot to Lu. He expresses it in his own idiosyncratic way through what he calls “Silly Bookstagram”, where he Photoshops fellow authors’ book covers to be about himself. Lu stresses that the braggadocious nature of the posts is an exaggerated persona but he enjoys connecting with, and promoting, other writers through this tongue-in-cheek project, which has had a real-life impact.

“It started to hit me when those fellow authors actually showed up for my book launch in Sydney,” he says. “I didn’t know them other than through Instagram but it felt like a way to connect in the most ‘me’ way possible.”

So what’s next for Australia’s latest Miles Franklin winner? Lu is tight-lipped but promises one thing: “It’s gonna be weirder than Ghost Cities.”

Sydney’s literati is about to get what Melbourne has had for more than decade – a rival to the Wheeler Centre that established the southern city’s Unesco-endorsed reputation as the literary and publishing capital of Australia.

On Sunday, the New South Wales arts minister, John Graham, announced the establishment of a dedicated literature hub, to be based out of the state’s public library, as is Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre.

The new hub, with initial funding of $1.5m from the state government, will mean Sydney writers’ festival events will take place all year round – 75 literary events over the next 12 months.

“There’s nothing like a festival in terms of the intensity and the sheer numbers of fantastic things that are on,” the creative director of the Sydney writers’ festival, Ann Mossop, told the Guardian.

“But this will be a little taste of the festival almost every week,” Mossop said.

The year-long calendar will draw from Australia’s deep literary talent pool and include appearances by international authors.

“We’ve had a situation in Sydney where … really, there are missed opportunities. We have fantastic books released by Australian authors … we also have amazing people coming to Australia for other events or festivals … but we haven’t been able to take advantage of their visits,” Mossop said.

The full program will be announced on 14 August, with the first events kicking off in September. Stella prize winner Michelle de Kretser, Burial Rites author Hannah Kent, the former Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, and Pulitzer-nominated The Atlantic journalist Sophie Gilbert have been confirmed.

The program will aim to deliver timely, engaging content that captures local and international literary voices, using a global literary exchange network and nurturing emerging Australian talent.

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Graham said the hub would provide an inclusive and accessible platform for NSW’s diverse communities, “amplifying underrepresented voices and strengthening the connection between writers and readers”.

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The recently refurbished 344-seat auditorium underneath the historic Mitchell Library reading room will be the headquarters for many of the program’s events, although Mossop said she expected free and family events to spread out across other library venues and elsewhere.

“The partnership recognises the role libraries play as the homes for readers and writers, and the great contribution that writers’ festivals play in taking what is quite a solitary act – reading – and transforming it into community experience,” Graham said in a statement.

“This $1.5m investment into a year-around program will benefit us all, strengthening the cultural heartbeat of our city, creating a home for readers and writers – a place for discussion, ideas, reflection, discovery.”

A peculiar aspect of the dawning of the digital age is that it has, in some respects, returned literary life to the 18th century. A hullabaloo of pamphleteers, the effective abolition of copyright – and a return to patronage networks and serial publication. In this context, then, the way in which literary writers are now turning to Substack – a platform that allows authors to send emails to a list of subscribers, and allows those subscribers to interact in comment forums – seems entirely natural.

Literary Substacks don’t follow a single pattern. For some, it’s a way of getting new work into the world, whether publishing a novel in serial form or hot-off-the-keyboard short stories; for others, it’s a way of interacting directly with readers (while building a handy marketing list); for still others, it’s a home for criticism, journalism, personal blowing off of steam, self-promotion, or a more direct version of the traditional writerly side hustle, teaching creative writing to aspiring authors.

Most of them offer tiers of subscription: a monthly fee (usually a fiver or so) gets you paywalled posts; there’ll be a discounted yearly fee; and a “founder member” platinum tier that, for a substantial hike in costs, offers some extra benefit such as signed copies, exclusive events or other interactions with the author. Most Substacks also let you sign up to public posts for free.

The selling points to its users are its immediacy and the freedom it gives writers to speak to the people interested in their work or their lives without corporate gatekeepers. And for those who can build up a solid list of paid subscribers – like the big-name journalists who ditched traditional media for Substack and made more money doing so – it has the potential to be a nice little earner.

Emma Gannon, described last year by the Bookseller as “one of the most popular novelists on Substack”, says that “the thing I love about it is it’s sort of unlike classic social media. It’s based on interests, rather than the humblebragging of showing your life as a highlight reel. People are geeking out on Substack about the things they love: writing, knitting, gardening. It’s got a different vibe to it, because people are showcasing what they’re interested in rather than what they are doing.”

It is, she says, “like old-school blogging, but people are having long interactions with each other in the comments, which feels really healthy”. She adds that the mechanism for recommending other Substacks means that “it’s got a real generosity of spirit built into it”. In an age when writers make less and less money, the patronage aspect – “People want to support me financially because they like what I’m doing, and it feels like a kind of: ‘I will pay you, not for a word count, not for a content transaction, just to kind of keep you going’” – has a human value.

Another prominent Substacker, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, shares that view. He says that with most social media the algorithm is the boss (a viral post he made on Facebook earned him 200,000 comments and dozens of death threats), but with Substack you’re engaging directly with people who are interested in your work: “I don’t want to outsource the decisions about this community to something that is inhuman and that has commercial interests.” When you interact with someone on Substack, he says, “I wouldn’t say it’s human – but it’s almost human.”

Author Margaret Atwood
Title In the Writing Burrow
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year
Typical post “The Oracle Mouths Off, Part 2”
What you get With characteristic puckish directness, Atwood promises subscribers a dose of “whatever comes into my addled, shrinking brain”. In practice, that means all sorts of sprightly stuff – a months-long digression on the French Revolution; notes from a book tour; prognostications about American politics; or personal material such as the inside story of Atwood getting a pacemaker (“The Report of My Death …”). It’s like getting letters from a wise, spiky and confiding aunt.

Author Hanif Kureishi
Title The Kureishi Chronicles
Cost £5 a month or £35 a year; £240 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “a copy of one of my books, signed with an inked thumb, as I am unable to use my hands”)
Typical post “Small Town Rebels”
What you get Kureishi’s Substack started with a catastrophe. At the end of 2022, the writer suffered a fall that injured his spine and deprived him of the use of his limbs. He wrote (or, rather, dictated) his way through his experience of this sudden disability (“Your writer,” was the moving sign-off to his tweets from his hospital bed) and his 2024 memoir, Shattered, went on to tell the story of his illness. This Substack was and remains a very intimate, episodic first draft of his experiences, a characteristically unsparing and humorous account of day-to-day life (“Heidi comes down, empties my urine bag […] before putting the kettle on”) mixed with a generous selection of essays, interviews and other material new and old.

Author Mary Gaitskill
Title Out of It
Cost Free
Typical post “Have Salt in Yourselves”
What you get Longform letters, about twice a month (though Gaitskill takes the occasional apologetic pause) on whatever crosses the mind of this outstandingly sharp and clear-eyed writer. Gaitskill – author of the short story collection Bad Behavior and the novels This Is Pleasure and Veronica – says she’s using her Substack “for the same reason I started writing a long time ago; to connect with people”. Literary meditation, memoir, rapturous appreciation of a pole-dancing video (“basically tickled my will to live”), or commentary on Donald Trump’s re-election through the prism of the memoirs of the eccentric, heroin-addicted British dandy Sebastian Horsley.

Author Elif Shafak
Title Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak
Cost £7 a month or £65 a year; £195 for “founding member” (extra benefit: personalised messages and signed copy of her new book)
Typical post “Reading Books in the Age of Angst”
What you get Audio, video, images, text. Shafak sees her Substack as a multimedia home for “literary fragments” and “vignettes from a bookish life”; a way of connecting directly with her readers. You’ll find reflections on Flaubert, Proust and George Sand, updates on Shafak’s globetrotting interventions, and meditations on the writing life and the life of the spirit.

Author George Saunders
Title Story Club with George Saunders
Cost £5 a month or £39 a year
Typical post “About This Here Sentence Right Here”
What you get A masterclass in the mechanics and techniques of short story writing from an outstanding critic of the form and a Booker prize-winning practitioner of fiction. The jumping-off point was Saunders’s book about the Russian masters, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. He’s interested in what short stories can tell us about ourselves and the world, too. Posts on Sunday (for paid subscribers) and every other Thursday (for everyone) include page-by-page close readings, as well as writing prompts and other discussions of the craft. Feedback and interaction are encouraged.

Author Salman Rushdie
Title Salman’s Sea of Stories
Cost $6 a month or $60 a year; $180 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “I’ll come up with something! For now, thank you very much”)
Typical post “The Seventh Wave, Episode 7”
What you get As well as a strong strand of the author’s musings on literary nonfiction (“Journalism as Literature”), which is one of the courses he teaches at New York University, the main sell for paid subscribers is access to emailed instalments of Rushdie’s serial novel The Seventh Wave: An Entertainment in 51 Episodes, which he has been writing since autumn 2021. His last Substack post was in August 2022, but the hiatus isn’t down to laziness. Five days later came the nearly successful attempt on his life.

Author Etgar Keret
Title Alphabet Soup
Cost £4 a month or £39 a year; £115 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “immortalised by having a problematic character in a future Alphabet Soup story named after them”)
Typical post “God the Midget”
What you get Keret is a hugely prolific Israeli writer of short stories whose Substack is the one that Rushdie (“So witty and enjoyable, and he’s clearly having a wonderful time doing it”) credits with getting him on board with the platform. In this newsletter, his “About” page says: “We serve two types of soup”. “Fresh soup” is a new text or first English publication (he writes a lot in Hebrew) of one of Keret’s texts – from stories to poems to screenplays to fragments of memoir or other nonfiction. “Canned soup” is something that’s been in print before. You can even get “alphabet audio soup”, which … makes your ears wet?

Author Roxane Gay
Title The Audacity
Cost £6 a month or £55 a year; £265 for “Ride or Die” (extra benefit: “my endless, boundless gratitude”)
Typical post “Private Rites: Lesbianpalooza”
What you get Gay is a novelist, memoirist, essayist, podcaster, comics writer (making her one of the first Black women, with co-writer Yona Harvey, to write a Marvel comic), journalist, cultural critic and academic. So you get a bit of all of that when you sign up for The Audacity. The heart of it is the Audacious Book Club, where Gay introduces a book every month (recent featured authors include Laila Lalami and Kevin Nguyen), with regular prompts for community discussion in the newsletter. There are also opportunities for paid subscribers to join an interview with the author over Zoom.

Author Howard Jacobson
Title Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson
Cost £5 a month or £55 a year; £150 for “founding member” (extra benefit not specified)
Typical post “The Necessity of Offence”
What you get Jacobson is as distinguished a journalist as he is a novelist, and his Substack hops tracks ad lib. Sometimes it’s an opinion column, sometimes whimsy (he kept a post about pleated trousers behind the paywall because, he notes wanly, “readers who might otherwise be circumspect are happy to pay for fashion tips”). There’s cultural commentary (including an excellently feeling post on the cultural appropriation of bagels) and in response to Trumpism and the war in Gaza, some characteristically acidic reflections on free speech and antisemitism. He’s a grouchy man, with good reason to be grouchy, and few grouch more eloquently.

Author Miranda July
Title Miranda July
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year; £135 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “you’ll be the first and possibly only people to know about certain things”)
Typical post “What is fun and how to fun and why fun”
What you get The Onion once published an article headlined: “Miranda July Called Before Congress to Explain Exactly What Her Whole Thing Is”. Accordingly, July’s Substack makes no promises to stay in its lane, and it offers subscribers “New writing! Lists! Dance videos! Other body things! Experimentation! Free form!” July is a multidisciplinary writer and artist, and if her Substack has a guiding principle it’s July’s magpie sensibility. So in addition to the newsletter the site hosts podcasts and vlogs, there’s a commenting community which July hopes will be “an actual good way for people to make friends, colleagues, lovers”, and an unboxing post commemorates the arrival of a vintage lavender dress July ordered on the internet.

Author Jami Attenberg
Title Craft Talk
Cost $8 a month or $60 a year; $100 a year for “dreamboat supporters” (extra benefit not specified)
Typical post “I Want You to Be Both Gentle and Tough With Yourself”
What you get Attenberg’s Substack is strongly tilted towards aspiring writers. The novelist and short story writer known for The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours has been running what she calls an “accountability practice” for writers called 1,000 Words on her newsletter since 2018. For two weeks each summer the Substack features #1000wordsofsummer – “a 52,000-strong community of writers of all levels who are all supporting each other to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks”. Which means a daily keep-it-up email from Attenberg, additional thoughts from a published writer guest-star most days, and a Slack and social media community for participants to share encouragement and brag about their word counts. The rest of the year sees Attenberg posting on aspects of literary craft – prompts, vignettes from the writing life, and even the odd interview – once a week, every week.

Author Chuck Palahniuk
Title Chuck Palahniuk’s Plot Spoiler
Cost £5 a month or £35 a year; £150 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “lifetime admission to Study Hall perks as Chuck invents them, personalised shit”)
Typical post “The Orgy Moment: Cascading Payoffs”
What you get Chuck Palahniuk’s lunch spoiler, potentially. The author of Fight Club has always had a taste for extreme material, and as he told me a few years back, Substack gives him “complete licence to put anything on the page that I want, and not be curbed by the timidity of the editor”. Subscribers can enjoy his Substack-exclusive serial novel Greener Pastures, as well as “short, upsetting fiction from me”. But it’s also a writing community, where Palahniuk showcases the work of his best students, dishes out “homework” (watch Animal House, “the douchiest movie ever”, carefully), offers giveaways and discusses craft in a direct and unpretentious way.

Author Emma Gannon
Title The Hyphen by Emma Gannon
Cost £8 a month or £69 a year; £100 for “I can expense this!” (extra benefit: “my eternal love and appreciation”)
Typical post “How I Make Six Figures on Substack”
What you get Gannon has a millennial’s ease in the multimedia environment: she’s a popular novelist, a podcaster, a journalist, trained life coach, wellbeing and business influencer, and all-round self-facilitating media node. She’s very engaged with her community and generous in paying it forward: a fortnightly “Slow Sunday Scroll” rounds up her recommendations of books, links, podcasts and consumer items she likes. Typical posts are savvy and friendly stuff about professional life and hanging on to your sanity in the social media age.

Author Catherine Lacey
Title Untitled Thought Project
Cost £4 a month or £43 a year; £75 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “my endless thanks”)
Typical post “Oh, God”
What you get Lacey, author of the astounding short story collection Certain American States, and fugitive postmodern novels such as Pew, Biography of X and Nobody Is Ever Missing, never writes the same book twice. Accordingly, perhaps, her Substack promises “a place of confusion and curiosity, a repository for open emails and things that are not quite essays”. Her special sauce in the Substack are her Oulipian micro-essays – exactly 144 words each, “a dozen times a dozen, also known as ‘a gross’, a term I learned while doing an inventory of nails and screws in my family’s hardware store”. A particularly charming aspect of the Substack is that the word limit means that even though the posts are “only for paid subscribers”, you get the whole micro-essay in the preview pane anyway.

Author Elif Batuman
Title The Elif Life
Cost £5 a month or £47 a year; £115 for “founding member” (extra benefit: “Periodic mini photo-essays of things I find interesting”)
Typical post “Adventures in Molybdomancy”
What you get Batuman’s bouncy brain bouncing into your inbox. Here, she muses on 1924, the connections between James Baldwin and Henry James, and the person who dissected Lenin’s cerebellum. There, she realises what the Beach Boys have to tell us about environment and culture, and how Surfing USA can, besides, cheer up the crosspatch writer. And elsewhere, she offers a bonus multimedia post “about my experience trying to have my fortune told with Turkish coffee grounds”. Erudite, elliptical and irrepressible.