It’s time to bid farewell to summer, and say a warm hello to autumn. As the days get shorter and the temperature falls, there’s at least a few of us in the EWF office eager to curl up and nest with some books in our downtime from working towards #EWF22! Here, the EWF team shares their autumn reads.

Ruby

I’ve currently got three books on the go, for different reasons.

I picked up some gelati and Assembly by Natasha Brown as a treat after a doctor’s appointment and started reading it immediately. I am also working my way through Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M. Lavery for leisure and A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer for some thematic and format research – so far, I’m finding a lot of humour and relatability in the former and mostly references to the Bellarine, where I spent a lot of time during my childhood, in the latter. I’ve also read this piece in Kill Your Darlings recently, which I think everyone should.

Alice

I recently finished Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and Happy Endings by Bella Green. I’m currently alternating between Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl, both of which are beautiful but heart-wrenching memoirs of loss. I have Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light and Jazz Money’s How to Make a Basket lined up next.

Greer

I just finished two novels, Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light and Jessica Au’s Cold Enough For Snow, so next I might go for nonfiction: for my birthday in January a friend gave me a copy of The Journalist and The Murderer by Janet Malcolm, and a couple of weeks ago another friend raved so fervently about Lesley Chow’s collection of essays about pop music, You’re History, that I ordered it as soon as we got off the phone.

Catherine

For the first time in some time I am dipping in and out books, picking up, putting down, passage here, passage there. It seems to be my main mood as we go into Autumn – real restlessness. The books competing for my attention are Homework by Snack Syndicate, Growing Up Asian in Australia, edited by Alice Pung, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life by Alice Rawsthorn and Inner Cities by Drusilla Modjeska.

Jen

I’ve been reading Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau and War of the Foxes by Richard Siken. I picked up a secondhand copy of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and I’m waiting to be in the right mindset to read it. I’ve also just put in an order for Rangikura by Tayi Tibble and Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar which I am very, very excited to arrive. For leisure I’ve been reading Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh alongside Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins and Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I recently finished Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce. Perhaps I’m writing this from another dimension, who knows?

Folole

I’ve struggled balancing my reading life with everything that has happened in life especially over the summer period. I am very hopeful that coming into my favourite season a.k.a winter I will dip into my long-awaited list of books to indulge my time of slowness with. For the meantime I have downloaded the Vā: Stories of Woman in the Moana by Tatou Publishing, a new press that supports indigenous women in the Solwara. Along with Gregory Pardlo’s Air Traffic, rereading Whispers and Vanities response works to Samoa’s Head of State…and awaiting another Children’s to arrive called I Am Not a Number by Jenny Kay Dupius, Kathy Kacer and Gillian Newland.