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ABC News
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
What should I read next? April's best books include exciting new work by Kate Grenville and Andrea Goldsmith
Consider that unpleasant feeling of not knowing what to read next fully remedied: in this month's Best Books column, ABC Arts critics recommend their favourite April reads — and there are some rippers. You'll find a love story with a twist, new works from Australian literary heavyweights, a gruesome thriller, and a crime novel where climate change plays a leading role. Unsettled by Kate Grenville Black Inc Grenville won the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her novel The Secret River. ( Supplied: Black Inc ) The colony will fall. Have you heard this phrase recently? It came to mind as I read Kate Grenville's latest work of non-fiction. Grenville has previously written several books that take the theft of this continent as their subject. Her most well-known, The Secret River, was a bestseller inspired by an ancestor who settled on the Hawkesbury River. In Unsettled, Grenville confronts, more directly than before, what it means to live on stolen country. She follows her family's stories to the places where they happened, "the sharp edge of the moving blade that was colonisation". Rather than assuming what she should look for, Grenville decides to take things as they come. She will be open, she decides: learning to see patterns does not mean solving a single crime but confronting a series of them. Sometimes, she finds silence. Sometimes, the loss of things that can never be recovered. Intellectual curiosity alone cannot make sense of everything. It cannot account for what to do with the unalterable truth of the violence committed. When you claim land was "taken up", do you deny the theft? Is it a weasel word, an attempt to domesticate all of the violence involved? As Grenville writes, "Now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge?" Elegantly and simply, Grenville lays out the contours of Australia's theft from her perspective as a descendant of one of the many involved. She practices ways of thinking and living that can make sense, not only of what has been taken, but of what may still be possible. In a continent that often delays confrontation with its colonial history, what happens after the fall? Responsibility for history, Grenville writes, is not always a matter of direct connection or participation: sometimes, one's responsibility is as simple as having benefited from the crime. — Declan Fry Landfall by James Bradley Penguin Landfall is Bradley's eighth work of fiction. ( Supplied: Penguin Books Australia ) A missing child, a noble cop and a race against time: at first glance, Australian writer James Bradley's latest book seems like a bog-standard crime novel. But there's a lot more going on here. Landfall is set in a near-future Sydney where rising sea levels have swallowed parts of the coast. In an area known as the 'Floodline', disadvantaged people live in the top stories of abandoned apartment buildings, improvised jetties providing access in and out. It's from this dystopian nightmare that a six-year-old child, Casey, has disappeared. Photo shows The Book Show Your favourite fiction authors share the story behind their latest books. Sadiya Azad is the detective on the case. A climate refugee herself, Sadiya is determined to find the missing child before a massive cyclone hits the coast. And the odds are stacked against her — she has enemies within the police, her father is ill and a corporation with links to the Floodline is not answering questions. Bradley has done something very clever with Landfall. He entices us in with all the bells and whistles of an unputdownable crime thriller, but then demands that we pay attention and imagine what our country could look like as climate change takes hold. — Claire Nichols The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith Transit Lounge Goldsmith's novels include The Prosperous Thief, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2003. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Adrian Moore is an academic who works on the cultural practices of death — the rituals, the poetry, the gestures and more. And this has nothing, he assures us, to do with the heartbreaking death of his mother when he was very young or the devastating death by suicide of his father a few years later. Nothing. At. All. Nothing to do with his failed relationships or cobwebby house, nothing to do with a certain dissatisfaction or a lack of revelation to his friends. But he is just one character in this novel of delicately interwoven lives. There's also Adrian's friend, Kezi, an artist in her late 20s who has escaped her evangelical family, and longs for some reconnection but has no need to repent or be forgiven. Photo shows Two women with dark hair smiling; one in a pink shirt and gold earrings, with her arm around the other, in a floral shirt Poet Dorothy Porter could take a handful of words and do extraordinary things with them. Her sister celebrates her work in a new memoir. And then, part way through, we encounter a third major character, Laura — a striking, confident, competent town planner, whose verve she somehow ascribes to someone else. We're taken into her worldview, but are also invited to doubt it, at least when it comes to her sense of herself. This spoiler alert is for her, not for the readers: Laura, your husband is awful. As these three characters meet and change each other, we can read their buried and revealed lives on multiple levels at once, which is of course the pleasure of complex fiction. — Kate Evans Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley Text Publishing Consider Yourself Kissed is a literary love story set in East London. ( Supplied: Text Publishing ) Coralie Bower, 29, is a copywriter in a London creative agency but dreams of being a writer. She left Sydney in a cloud of shame and relishes, with a sense of masochism, the anonymity the new city offers her. That is, until she meets Adam, a 37-year-old political journalist and father of one. The meet-cute is dispensed with expeditiously: Coralie fishes Adam's five-year-old daughter, Zora, out of a freezing duck pond in the first chapter. They quickly become an item and when her lease runs out, it makes perfect sense for her to move in with him. They are perfect together — someone even stops them in the street to tell them so. But being perfect together isn't enough. Photo shows Close up photo of Saman Shad in floral jacket with red slipstick and brown hair to the side, smiling slightly with closed mouth. When Saman Shad sat down to write her latest novel, she came up against the challenges of how to find time to write with three small children. Despite her youth and inexperience with children, Coralie quickly takes on a large share of caring for Zora, who she loves. We see Coralie assume more and more of the mental load of their domestic lives, a disparity that grows even larger when she and Adam have two children. Coralie's writing aspirations become a distant memory as Adam's professional life takes precedence. Many readers will find Coralie's struggle to juggle her career with caring responsibilities deeply familiar as she's passed over for a promotion, deemed not committed enough to the job because she leaves early to pick up her children. Australian author Jessica Stanley's 2022 debut novel, A Great Hope, featured a fictitious Labor politician at its centre and her interest in politics is evident here too as general elections and Brexit form a backdrop to Coralie and Adam's everyday lives. A clever and funny rom-com in the vein of Dolly Alderton's Good Material, Consider Yourself Kissed shows how relationships have to change to find an equitable balance for both partners. — Nicola Heath Orpheus Nine by Chris Flynn Hachette Australia Flynn says the premise for Orpheus Nine came to him in a dream. ( Supplied: Hachette Australia ) Brace yourself: this supernatural thriller starts with one of the most shocking scenes I've read in a long time. At an under-10s soccer game in regional Victoria, the kids on the field suddenly stop playing. The children seem stuck to the spot, unable to move, before they all start singing in Latin, in high clear voices. Then — and this is where it gets really awful — their bodies start swelling, filling with salt. Moments later, they're all dead. It turns out this hasn't just happened here. All around the world, every nine-year-old has died in the same gruesome way. And from here on in, it will continue, with every child destined to die the day they turn nine. Photo shows A bald white man wearing a white collared shirt, pictured in front of a bookshelf Is it a virus? Alien invasion? Terrorism? It doesn't really matter. What Belfast-born, Australian-based author Chris Flynn (who says the opening of this book came to him in a dream) is interested in is the impact of this event, known as Orpheus Nine, on the parents left in this small country town. Those who have lost their children are angry and ready to take action. Those whose children survived — because they were 10 or older — feel fated for greatness. And the parents of children about to turn nine are desperate to save them from disaster. Cue the rise of "saltfluencers" — Instagram mums promoting the potentially life-saving benefits of a salt-free diet. Orpheus Nine is bizarre, funny, horrifying and tender. Take a deep breath and read it — you'll be glad you did. — Claire Nichols Good Girl by Aria Aber Bloomsbury Publishing Good Girl is shortlisted for the 2025 Women's Prize for Fiction. ( Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing ) Good Girl is a gritty, dark and rich coming-of-age story. Born and raised in the "ghetto-heart" of Berlin, our protagonist Nila feels adrift, unfixed and burdened by shame. When we meet her, Nila is a party girl. Her life is "purgatorial and meaningless": she goes out, drinks, takes drugs and avoids her father. Nila is Afghan yet denies this at every opportunity, claiming, if asked, an ancestry she considers more palatable: Greek or Italian. Her family's experience of trauma, Islamophobia and racism have left Nila fearful and averse to her own identity. Photo shows A young white woman with chin-length red hair wearing black stands side on against a backdrop of green leafy plants The sad girl novel maps the emotional landscape of a generation. When Nila meets Marlowe, an older American writer, and falls in with his friends, she begins to drift even further from herself. Nila calls herself "his loyal stray" and willingly submits to Marlowe both sexually and socially. Fearing that her new friends will smell "the whiff of my poverty and family history" she lies and lies again, forgoing anything left of her Afghan identity. Aria Aber's prose is lush and unflinching, with the visceral descriptions of sweaty clubs and devastating come-downs highlighting her background as a poet. In a literary trope repeated in recent years — younger waifish woman falls for older and richer man — Aber notably brings a new perspective. She unpacks what it means for Nila to be a "good girl". Is it a submissive partner to Marlowe? A pure and honourable Afghan girl for her family? Or the creative and independent artist that she imagines for herself? — Rosie Ofori Ward I Ate the Whole World to Find You by Rachel Ang Scribe Publications Ang is an artist and writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Age and Meanjin. ( Supplied: Scribe Publications ) The art leaps out from the first page: in the foreground, a fish head, menacing and skeletal. In the background, shadows hover around a family seated at a table. In Rachel Ang's graphic novel debut, the unsaid, the implicit, the suggested and the hidden all loom as large, if not larger, than what is visible. The book's five stories follow Jenny, a woman stumbling through her late 20s. In the opening story, 'Hunger', Jenny and a co-worker converse. It is clear they are talking around things, that there is something between them. (Playfully, Ang makes this obscurity explicit by drawing obscured speech bubbles.) Their burgeoning romance grows complicated when he reveals a sexual kink to her. Photo shows An illustration of falling books on a beige background with the ABC logo and text reading The ABC Book Club The ABC's place for readers to talk books — with each other, with books specialists from across the ABC, and with your favourite authors. Jenny is someone who knows but does not know, or perhaps does not want to. Seemingly banal conversations and ordinary events often reveal aspects of the characters they might otherwise wish to conceal. In 'The Passenger', Jenny's self-absorption allows her to conceal jealousy toward a defensive ex, both former partners variously ignoring and embarrassing the ex's new one. In the harrowing 'Your Shadow in the Dark', a cousin's trauma manifests in ways that cause Jenny to miss an opportunity to commiserate with her, then finally learn how to begin to. Such ambiguities and suggestive evocations make each narrative more layered than their surfaces may suggest. The final story offers hope for Jenny, as both language and self split and disintegrate in order to create something new. There is movement and dimension to the contours of Ang's black-and-white line art. Their ability to evoke night scenes and darkness is tactile: check out the beautiful rendering of Melbourne's Peel Street in the opening story. Working into each colour's gradations with subtlety and depth, Ang suggests a place where even the shadows have shadows. — Declan Fry Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm Transit Lounge Shirm is the author of Having Cried Wolf, Where the Light Falls and The Crying Room. ( Supplied: Transit Lounge ) Out of the Woods makes a powerful statement about bones: the bones of men and boys killed in the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. The bones of children and husbands and brothers and friends; the bones of memory, rendered bare by time and memory and scrutiny or lack of it. Bones unearthed, in part, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 2006. Australian novelist, critic and lawyer Gretchen Shirm draws us into the process of bearing witness, through the character of Jess, a woman who has left Sydney behind to work as a judge's assistant at the tribunal. Through this woman's experience, we are given a delicate and thoughtful entrée into important stories of war, into The Hague, and into one woman's life and history, as she becomes more than a conduit for words and translations. Photo shows The Bookshelf Podcast Image The latest and best fiction reviewed by a team of dedicated bibliophiles. What does it mean that she watches the main defendant and feels some sympathy for his sadness, his sore leg, what she thinks are his kind eyes? What does it mean to make eye contact with this man, who denied holding guns but was part of the bigger-picture organisation? The deeper the story develops, the more we enter into Jess's own life and history: her childhood of poverty and trauma, her love for her son, her tentative relationship with a tall Dutch security guard, with his sweet punning jokes. In between Jess's work and life, there are patches of other text — in a thinner font, stark — of witness testimony, drawn from actual evidence statements from the Tribunal (Shirm herself worked there as a legal intern in 2006). This is a difficult balance, full of ethical and moral decisions — both for the world and for a novelist, an artist — and Shirm handles it beautifully. — Kate Evans Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for and 10am Fridays for .
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Blood-pumping', ‘outstanding', ‘urgent and essential': the best Australian books out in April
Nonfiction, Black Inc, $36.99 Twenty years after she fictionalised her ex-convict great-great-great-grandfather Solomon Wiseman in The Secret River, speculating he took part in killing Dharug people, Grenville makes a pilgrimage through the landscape of northern New South Wales to better understand more than two centuries of suffering by Indigenous people dispossessed by colonisation. Moments of profound clarity ensue in Unsettled: looking down on Mogo Creek to the Hawkesbury River's north, Grenville's imagination tracks her great-great uncles riding horseback armed with guns. 'In the great humming silence of this landscape – a silence created in part by what people like my forebears did – I know how little I really belong.' – Steve Dow Fiction, Ultimo Press, $34.99 In former Triple J presenter Vijay Khurana's debut novel, two schoolboys flee their small town in Canada for a road trip to wherever. Adam is the alpha, an apparent student of Tate and Peterson and the only licensed driver – but it's Teddy who has the gun licence, and the money to put it to use. The devastating story that follows – narrated by each character in alternating chapters – is a tense and gripping power struggle of toxic masculinity, as the teenagers push each other further and further down a violent road of no return. Where hit UK TV show Adolescence illuminated the myriad societal failures that are driving young boys to violence, this outstanding debut takes us inside the darkest and most vulnerable parts of their minds. – Steph Harmon Poetry, UQP, $29.99 Safdar Ahmed, whose graphic memoir Still Alive was a searing indictment of Australia's refugee detention system, teams up with poet and author Omar Sakr (Non-Essential Work; The Lost Arabs) for this collection of poems and illustrations responding to the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023. Read cover to cover, it evokes Sakr's excruciating, sometimes bewildered, experience of bearing daily witness from afar (heightened by recently becoming a father), while the poet and artist both grapple with the moral complexities of their roles documenting what Sakr describes as 'the daily immiseration of Palestinians in the brutal reality of apartheid'. As the people of Palestine continue to suffer systemic violence and dehumanisation, this is urgent, essential work. – Dee Jefferson Fiction, Hachette, $32.99 Chris Flynn's fourth novel follows a trio of old friends – who grew up together in the small country town of Gattan – in the aftermath of an inexplicable global catastrophe, which sees every nine-year-old on the planet suddenly drop dead. Each of them is struggling, in their own way, to regain some sense of agency in the face of this threat, and to protect or honour their children as the world threatens to collapse around them. This is a fast-paced and compelling novel, written with Flynn's characteristic dark humour, and great generosity of heart as well. – Fiona Wright Fiction, Allen & Unwin, $32.99 Debut author Sophie Quick's sharp, pacy satire centres on an unexpected antihero: a scammer with a heart of gold. Christina is a single mum in suburban Melbourne who has created a Zoom-only alter ego – Dr Ruth Carlisle – for the purposes of life coaching, then blackmailing her clients. As we learn more about her background, Christina's actions take on a Robin Hood quality. Her targets are wealthy – grifty influencers and sleazy marketers – while her financial situation is shaky at best. Taking aim at TedCore and the self improvement industrial complex, the story also contains shades of Caroline and Natalie. Timely and slyly funny, it is a gut-check for anyone who's ever taken social media-sized slivers of life advice too seriously. – Alyx Gorman Fiction, UQP, $34.99 Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion The premise might feel a dime a dozen: disillusioned woman flees big city to find herself in an exotic location. But this short, sparse, deeply absorbing debut – which won the 2024 Victorian premier's literary prize for an unpublished manuscript – is about so much more than that. Ruth's refuge is Guatemala: a tourist town called Panajachel, painted so vividly you can almost see it. There she meets two women who inspire two very different infatuations; and soon, without us even noticing, Ruth is stuck – with a job, a house, and a desire to go deeper into the country and into herself. The promo calls the novel 'perfect for fans of Deborah Levy, Miranda July and Rachel Cusk'; as a fan of all three, I loved this one too. – Steph Harmon Fiction, Transit Lounge, $34.99 What does it mean to bear witness? To listen to the survivors of war crimes recount their experiences and suffering? Out of the Woods, Gretchen Shirm's fourth novel, offers a poignant, insightful answer. Incorporating real witness testimony, the narrative is closely intertwined with real events: namely the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995, and the conviction at The Hague of a senior military commander for genocide. Though imperfect, the story asks probing questions about how we can begin to comprehend the incomprehensible. – Jack Callil Crime/thriller, Penguin Australia, $34.99 This is a return-of-sorts to familiar territory for Bradley, who writes timely and thrilling novels imbued with a sense of social urgency, often involving the climate crisis and scientific developments. His last book, Deep Water, was a nonfiction hit – but he's back on fiction again, this time a crime novel set in a future Sydney that has been transformed by rising sea levels. This propulsive novel follows Senior Detective Sadiya Azad's efforts to find a missing five-year-old who disappeared 'in the tideline', amid submerged apartments and pontoons as a huge storm approaches. – Sian Cain Graphic novel, Scribe, $39.99 Rachel Ang's graphic novel is made to be devoured. Blood-pumping and fresh, these five loosely connected tales revolve around Jenny, a young Australian woman who stumbles through interactions with lovers, family and strangers with a sense of paralysis. From feeding fetishes, repressed childhood horrors and surreal exchanges with her future child, Jenny endures much in her painful quest to overcome bodily shame, and to connect. Ang's expressive compositions and darkly comic voice perfectly capture these hermetic moments, which appear so slight and mundane on the surface but belie an interior storm. A bold, hallucinogenic collection that feels uncomfortably human. – Claire Cao Nonfiction, UNSW, $34.99 By her own admission, Jane Rawson is not a nature natural. A novelist, former environment editor at the Conversation and literary magazine editor, her comfort zone is less bushcraft, more towncraft. In Human/Nature, she weaves in her own complex relationship with nature as she dissects the broader human understanding of the natural world, offering a moment of pause as the environment changes around us. With levity, beauty and deep contemplation Human/Nature interrogates how our own ideas of purity, intelligence, care (for starters) affect how we impact, ignore, undermine and protect all the wild things which are not human. – Celina Ribeiro Cookbook, Murdoch Books, $29.99 Zucchinis were the gateway veg for Alex Elliott-Howery's pickling habit. Her partner had a bountiful back yard crop that her kids didn't want to eat, so she taught herself to pickle. Her hobby became an obsession and then a business, when she opened Sydney's now-closed neighbourhood cafe Cornersmith in 2012. Four cookbooks, community cooking classes and another cafe later, she's a leading force in delicious solutions to food waste. Her fifth book goes back to basics, featuring 80 quick, achievable recipes for condiments, such as bread and butter cucumber pickles, cauliflower relish and banana ketchup. It's no-fuss, light on storytelling and keeps it seasonal. A truly compelling pocket-sized guide to making your kitchen scraps worth keeping. – Emma Joyce
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
I have been an AI researcher for 40 years. What tech giants are doing to book publishing is akin to theft
Australia's close-knit literary community – from writers and agents through to the Australian Society of Authors – have reacted with outrage. Black Inc, the publisher of the Quarterly Essay as well as fiction and nonfiction books by many prominent writers, had asked consent from its authors to train AI models on their work and then share the revenue with those authors. Now I have a dog in this race. Actually two dogs. I have published four books with Black Inc, have a fifth coming out next month, and have a contract for a sixth by the end of the year. And I have also been an AI researcher for 40 years, training AI models with data. I signed Black Inc's deal. Yes, the publisher could have communicated its intent with more transparency and a little less urgency. With whom exactly is it trying to sign a deal? And for what? And why only give us a few days to sign? But all in all, I am sympathetic to where Black Inc finds itself. Small publishers such as Black Inc provide a valuable service to Australian literature and to our cultural heritage. No one starts a new publisher to make big money. Indeed, many small publishers are struggling to survive in a market dominated by the Big Five. For example, Penguin Random House – the world's largest general book publisher – recently acquired one of Australia's leading independent publishers, the Text Publishing Company. Publishing is like venture capital. Most books lose money. Publishers make a return with the occasional bestseller. Small publishers like Black Inc nurture new Australian authors. And they publish many works that are worthy but are unlikely to make a profit. I am grateful then for their support of my modest literary career, and of the esteemed company I share, authors such as Richard Flanagan, David Marr and Noel Pearson. But I am outraged. I am outraged at the tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta for training their AI models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Llama, on my copyrighted books without either my consent or offering me or Black Inc any compensation. I told Black Inc that this was happening in early 2023. They asked how I knew since the tech companies are lacking in transparency on their training data. I told them that ChatGPT could give you a good summary of Chapter 4 of my first book. The tech companies claim this is 'fair use'. I don't see it this way. Last year, at the Sydney Writers' festival, I called it the greatest heist in human history. All of human culture is being ingested into these AI models for the profit of a few technology companies. To add insult to outrage, the tech companies didn't even pay for the copy of my book or likely the tens of thousand other books they used to train their models. My book isn't available freely online. And, as far as I can tell, they trained on an illegal copy in books3, an online dataset assembled by Russian pirates. That's not fair. Nor is it sustainable. We're at the Napster moment in the AI race. When we started streaming music in the early 2000s, most of it was stolen. That wasn't going to work in the long run. Who could afford to be a musician if no one paid for music? Napster was shortly sued out of business. And streaming services such as Spotify started, which paid musicians for their labours. Streaming is still not perfect. Popular artists like Taylor Swift make a good living, but the pennies being returned to struggling musicians for their streams is arguably still inadequate. Publishing needs to go in a similar direction as streaming. And for that to happen, small publishers especially need a strong position to negotiate with the mighty tech companies. I therefore signed Black Inc's contract. It is, in my view, the lesser of the two evils. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion It is outrageous how the British government is trying to sell out artists with their proposed changes to copyright law. The controversial changes would allow AI developers to train their models on any material to which they have lawful access, and would require creators to proactively opt out to stop their work from being used. It is outrageous that the technology companies argue that AI models being trained on books is no different from humans reading a copyrighted book. It's not. It's a different scale. The AI models are trained on more books than a human could read in a lifetime of reading. And, as the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI argues, it's taking business away from publishers that is keeping them alive. Imagine a future where these large AI models ingest all of our digital knowledge. Not just books. All of science. All of our cultural knowledge. All of personal knowledge. This is Big Brother but not exactly as Orwell imagined. It is not a government, but a large tech company that will know more about us and the world than a human could possibly comprehend. Imagine also that these companies use all this information to manipulate what we do and what we buy in ways that we couldn't begin to understand. Perhaps the most beautiful part of this digital heist is that all of this knowledge is being stolen in broad daylight. Napster was a rather minor and petty crime in comparison. Toby Walsh is professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Sign our own death warrant': Australian writers angry after Melbourne publisher asks them to sign AI agreements
c The writers were asked to grant Black Inc 'the right to reproduce or use, adapt and exploit the work in connection with the development of any software program, including, without limitation, training, testing, validation and the deployment of a machine learning or generative artificial intelligence system'. The deal sees the publisher split the net receipts with the author 50/50. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email The Guardian has confirmed a number of writers published by Black Inc received the request to alter their contracts last week. The documents sent by the company's publishing coordinator promise that, by authorising their works to be used by an unspecified AI company, authors would unlock 'new revenue streams' with their works receiving 'increased visibility and credibility'. 'I feel like we're being asked to sign our own death warrant,' said Laura Jean McKay, author of Holiday in Cambodia, published with Black Inc a decade ago and shortlisted for three literary awards. McKay says she received the addendum to her contract on Friday, and was worried that three business days was not long enough to decipher what copyright Black Inc was asking her to sign. 'I was very concerned that there was absolutely no prior discussion … this is a very unregulated frontier that we're moving into. And the Australian government still doesn't have clear guidelines and has no real regulations for generative AI.' Veteran agent Lyn Tranter, owner of Australian Literary Management, said she was 'totally and utterly perplexed' by the publisher pursuing consent from its stable of writers in that timeframe. 'It's a serious matter. [AI] is not included in the original contract, so an addendum has to be done, and I think that's something that has to be treated seriously and looked into and weighed up,' she said. 'To be honest, I don't think they [Black Inc] know what they're doing.' The Australian Society of Authors said Black Inc's request for its authors to agree to such a broad grant of rights within four days was 'outrageous'. 'What is the rush?' asked the ASA's chief executive Lucy Hayward. 'We don't know who Black Inc will sub-license to, what conditions they will impose, or what the fee will be. Asking for blanket permission for all future licensing – particularly under time pressure – is unnecessary and unfair.' Hayward also said the 50/50 split – similar to the offer HarperCollins put before its stable of writers last year – did not represent fair compensation. 'The ASA supports the US Authors Guild's guidance on a fair split for AI licensing deals – 75% to the author and 25% to the publisher on the basis that it is the authors' expression and ideas – the text – that are of most value in AI training, and it is authors' and illustrators' work that is likely to be displaced or supplanted by this technology,' she said. A statement from Black Inc's head of marketing and publicity, Kate Nash, said the opt-in agreement granted it permission to negotiate the terms and conditions it deemed reasonable with 'reputable' AI companies. The statement did not say which AI companies it was negotiating with. Nash said 'many' writers had already granted Black Inc permission to sub-license their work in this way. 'We believe authors should be credited and compensated appropriately and that safeguards are necessary to protect ownership rights in response to increasing industrial automation.' Melbourne literary agent Jenny Darling questioned why publishers were brokering deals with AI companies at all. 'Publishers are in the business of publishing books,' Darling said. 'Why are they entering into agreements with AI companies? Is their business not big enough, don't they know how to make money publishing books any more?' Or more bluntly from Tranter: 'The industry is in such serious shit at the moment … what with the takeover of Text and Affirm, it's just the tip of the iceberg. I spoke to [a publishing colleague] and he said to me, 'You know, we're dead. You know, it's just going down the toilet'.' Journalist Hamish McDonald, whose second book published by Black Inc – Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania – is due to be released later this month, said the AI deal came 'out of the blue'. 'They want us to all sign by tomorrow,' he said on Monday. 'I'm asking Black Inc for more information. I won't be signing anything yet.' McKay said the vagueness of the offer was understandable 'because I don't think they actually know what they're getting into'. 'This is uncharted territory. It's an unregulated sort of wild west climate of AI advancement … it's a notoriously and purposefully unregulated industry. And trillion-dollar companies like Meta and Google and Telegram are stridently oppositional to regulation.' The Australian government has so far only conducted an inquiry into the use of AI in the Australian education system, with the house standing committee on employment, education and training releasing its final report last August. The UK government has just completed a 10-week consultation period examining how to redraft copyright laws in the publishing industry to adjust to AI technology.
