Provocation, ruin and empire: your guide to the 2026 Miles Franklin shortlist

By Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of SydneyAugust 4, 2026

These Miles Franklin shortlisted novels offer six very different answers to the question: what can Australian fiction be – and do?

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Ted Lasso returns: why its story of kindness owes so much to ‘orphan girl’ fiction

Using orphan girl novels to study Ted Lasso brings certain themes into sharper focus – particularly its concern with fatherhood.

Joe Sutliff Sanders, Associate Professor in Children's Literature in Education, University of CambridgeAug 4, 2026

The Conversation

AI translators are getting more fluent – but communication is never just a matter of words

AI translation can be fast, convenient and fluent. But that does not guarantee people will understand each other.

Lucas N Vieira, Professor of Translation and Technology, School of Modern Languages, University of BristolAug 3, 2026

Literary Hub

Awake Awake

All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell

Lit Hub ExcerptsAug 5, 2026

Literary Hub

Rumpelstiltskin is My Unlikely Writing Companion

A few years ago, scrolling through social media when I should have been writing, I came across a photo of the Lady Bird edition of Rumpelstiltskin. Struggling to remember the specifics of the story, I googled it. There, in the

Louise NealonAug 5, 2026

The New Yorker

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An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star

Jacqueline Harpman wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era.

Katy WaldmanAug 3, 202610 min read

Public Books

“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins

How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway? The post “Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins appeared first on Public Books.

Megan CumminsAug 4, 2026