ABR Critics Goldsworthy

Critic of the Month

Kerryn Goldsworthy is a writer, critic, reviewer, essayist, columnist, anthologist and sometime fiction writer who taught at the University of Melbourne for seventeen years. She has also taught at Deakin, Flinders and Adelaide Universities, and briefly at the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria. She now lives and works as a freelance writer and independent scholar in her home town of Adelaide.

She has edited four anthologies of Australian writing, and has written a critical study of Helen Garner and a collection of short stories, North of the Moonlight Sonata. She writes regularly for The Monthly, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, as well as for ABR. She has been a judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and an editor of ABR. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the idea of the family, and keeps her writing hand in with daily practice at her two blogs, A Fugitive Phenomenon and Pavlov's Cat.

Kerryn Goldsworthy and ABR

Kerryn has been reviewing for ABR since 1984. She was Editor in 1986-87 and learned more about human nature in those two years than in either the preceding thirty-three or the following nineteen. She has been associated with the journal in various capacities ever since, including three contributions to the long-standing essay series.

Kerryn Goldsworthy on reviewing

Thoughtful and simultaneous engagement with content and context is one of my main criteria for a good review: the other is a structured argument. I like a review that works in two ways at once, bouncing back and forth between the text and its various contexts, and at the same time working its way forward in a shapely fashion towards some general conclusion about the book. I don't much like rough play or over-the-top cattiness and spattiness: if one must put the boot in, one should attempt to do so with quiet elegance.

Some ABR reviews by Kerryn Goldsworthy