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Writing About Books

w/ Declan Fry

The best writers are also great readers. In this course you will learn to read like a writer – discovering how to read a book closely in order to write reviews for publication and find ways to read to inspire your own creative writing.

Thursdays, 6 – 20 October, 6.30-8.30pm

$295 / $250.75 alumni


This is a past course.

In this engaging new course, Declan Fry – a regular critic for the Saturday Paper, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – will guide you through close reading exercises that will help you pay attention to the details you will need to take from a book in order to form a convincing critique. How can you call upon your reading history to back up an opinion? How can you establish reading practices to improve your writing?

This course is designed to build your skills as both a reader and a writer. You will be shown ways that reading can inspire writing, discovering that reading is as much a generative exercise as writing itself.

Time and space will be given in class to produce creative responses to a series of set texts, while learning key lessons that you will be able to return to again in your writing practice.

Your course includes:

• 3 weeks of 2 hour evening tutorials
• A complimentary copy of a recent A&U publication
• On completion of the course, alumni discounts on future Faber Writing Academy courses and books from the Allen & Unwin Website


Writers you'll be working with:

Declan Fry

Declan Fry has written for the Guardian, Overland, Australian Book Review, Liminal,  Westerly and elsewhere. His Meanjin essay “Justice for Elijah or a Spiritual Dialogue with Ziggy Ramo, Dancing” received the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and selected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2021….

Course outline

Session 1: Thursday 6 October

  • Coming to the text
  • Reading around the text
  • Establishing a reading practice

Session 2: Thursday 13 October

  • Freshness of voice
  • How reviews communicate
  • Avoiding cliché

Session 3: Thursday 20 October

  • Publication
  • Following the conversation

How to Book

This is a past course.