Literary critic Susan Lever is general editor of the Cambria Australian Literature Series. She is writing a biography of the poet A.D. Hope.
Books & arts
A kind of elegy
Susan Lever
27 June 2025
An award-winning memoir honours cultures old and new
Books & arts
Don’t turn your back on the play
Susan Lever
15 January 2025
Helen Garner reminds us that there are beginnings as well as ends
Books & arts
Epistolary lives
Susan Lever
16 May 2024
Forty years of correspondence illuminates the careers of two important Australian writers
Books & arts
A fragment of a life
Susan Lever
28 March 2024
Charmian Clift’s most ambitious but unfinished work illuminates her childhood in coastal New South Wales
Books & arts
Writing life
Susan Lever
3 January 2024
A new biography of Frank Moorhouse approaches its subject differently
Books & arts
Grand days
Susan Lever
1 September 2023
Frank Moorhouse’s first biographer captures a life in motion
Books & arts
With sojourns in Italy
Susan Lever
20 December 2022
How Shirley Hazzard resisted provincialism
Books & arts
When Betty took over the Pram Factory
Susan Lever
11 October 2022
Kath Kenny’s intergenerational account of a key moment in Australian theatre
Books & arts
Good-natured revenge
Susan Lever
1 December 2021
Despite his critics, David Williamson created a remarkable body of popular work
Books & arts
Feeding the machine
Susan Lever
11 October 2021
In what ways did the typewriter affect how — and how much — writers wrote?
Books & arts
A hard nut in the centre
Susan Lever
18 December 2020
Books | A writer’s complex life emerges in Helen Garner’s diaries
Books & arts
On the offensive
Susan Lever
5 November 2020
Books | Are Australians unusually prone to bad language?
Books & arts
Imaginative affinities
Susan Lever
10 September 2020
Books | Australian modernist literature looks a little different through an international lens
From the archive
What more can we expect?
Susan Lever
21 July 2020
Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction vividly evokes mid-twentieth-century Australia
Books & arts
Farmer-poet among friends
Susan Lever
14 July 2020
Books | A new biography traces the works and days of poet David Campbell
Books & arts
TV drama and the revival of Australian theatre and film
Susan Lever
2 June 2020
Did Australian drama really go missing during the 1960s, as the standard accounts of theatre history assume?
Books & arts
The conditions of art
Susan Lever
22 April 2020
Books | Award-winning biographer Brenda Niall throws fresh light on four intriguing women writers
Books & arts
Deeper truths
Susan Lever
6 April 2020
Books | What can novels tell us about how political ideas circulate?
Books & arts
Rich world’s folly
Susan Lever
19 November 2019
Books | Andrew McGahan was a talented writer with a strong ethical sense who never took himself too seriously
Books & arts
Whatever happened to Australian literature?
Susan Lever
29 October 2019
The scrapping of Sydney University’s professorship has great symbolic importance
Books & arts
Ghosted
Susan Lever
13 August 2019
Books | Two women’s experience of deafness, a century apart
Books & arts
The decade of thinking dangerously
Susan Lever
8 March 2019
The 1970s saw the rise of women as a political constituency in Australia
Books & arts
Saint Germaine
Susan Lever
7 December 2018
Elizabeth Kleinhenz explores the contradictions of Australia’s most famous feminist
Books & arts
Going back to where we came from
Susan Lever
5 October 2018
Do Sydney’s theatre audiences yearn for the city of old?
Books & arts
Writers over America
Susan Lever
25 September 2018
Books | Critics and readers in the United States played a little-known role in the history of Australian fiction
Books & arts
Her mother’s secrets
Susan Lever
13 July 2018
Books | Nadia Wheatley discovers her mother’s two great loves
Essays & reportage
Royal drama, with variations
Susan Lever
6 June 2018
A wedding, four plays and a TV series — do the British have something to teach us about scrutinising power?
Books & arts
Writers writing about writers and writing
Susan Lever
18 December 2017
Books | Publishers seem to prefer other writers — rather than critics — to write about writers
Books & arts
Knocked sideways by luck
Susan Lever
31 July 2017
Three writers explore the mixed inheritances that helped fuel their work
Books & arts
Reaping what was sown
Susan Lever
4 May 2017
An unconventional history shows us personal and emotional engagements with the history of the WA wheatbelt
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