Jacqueline Kent

A moving and powerful memoir of love, loss and a shared passion for words. In 1985 Jacqueline Kent was content with her life. She had a satisfying career as a freelance book editor and was emerging as a writer. Living and working alone, she relished her independence. But then she met Kenneth Cook, author of the Australian classic Wake in...

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation. As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the...

Beatrice Davis, 1909–1992, was the general editor at Angus and Robertson, the main Australian publishing company, from 1937 to 1973. There, she discovered and published writers such as Thea Astley, Miles Franklin, Patricia Wrightson, Xavier Herbert, and Hal Porter, becoming a literary tastemaker in the process. A central figure in Australian literature, she was 'respected, feared, courted and berated.' Originally...

Australia's crusaders for women's voting rights and the radical feminists of the 1970s changed lives across the country and around the globe. But what about the generation in between? Throughout the twentieth century, a group of trailblazing women writers challenged the nation's status quo. Miles Franklin's forceful voice invigorated the emerging women's movement, Mary Gilmore was a groundbreaking feminist journalist,...