Beverley Farmer

Winner of the Australian Book Design Award 2021: Best Designed Literary Fiction Cover A new edition of Beverley Farmer's out-of-print classic A Body of Water, which in its mixing of genres—essay, memoir, fiction, folk tale—opened up new frontiers for Australian literature. A Body of Water was first published thirty years ago. The writing of the book takes place over a...

A new edition of Beverley Farmer's classic 1980 debut, out of print for many years. Alone captures the emergence of one of Australia's most powerful and distinctive writers. Set in Melbourne in the late 1950s, and taking place over the course of two days and nights, Alone chronicles the feelings of obsession and hopelessness, isolation and desire provoked by the...

Portrait of a widow in mourning by one of Australia's most important women writers The Seal Woman was first published to acclaim in 1992 but has been out of print for many years. The novel explores the mind of a middle-aged Danish woman mourning the recent death of her husband at sea, in a cottage lent to her by friends...

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, water, fire and blood, light and darkness. What does art know that we do not? How does...

This Water is likely to be the last work by Beverley Farmer, one of Australia's great prose stylists, and a pioneer of women's writing. Her exploration of feminine concerns and her use of different literary forms—novel, short story, poetry, essay, journal, myth, and fairy tale—are unparalleled. This Water is a collection of five tales, three of them novella length, each...

Beverley Farmer is one of our finest prose writers, but her new book, For the Seasons: Haikus, is likely to make her reputation as a poet too. The manuscript of For the Seasons, composed over twenty-five years ago, was rediscovered by the critic and scholar Lyn Jacobs after Farmer's death in 2018. The collection has never been published in full...