The Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) anthology is here again, and readers are in for a treat: a wide-ranging selection of easy-to-read articles describing some of the amazing science that is happening right now.
Of course, it is an impossible task, choosing the ‘best’ writing, and in her introduction editor Donna Lu acknowledges her subjectivity. It is the same for a reviewer, and since I don’t have room to name everyone, I won’t single out my own favourites. Instead, I will offer some general thoughts, sparked by Lu’s welcome attempt to grapple with the question of what constitutes great science writing. She takes her lead from a surprising source, novelist Ian McEwan. In a 2006 Guardian essay on the importance of a literary science canon, McEwan asked, ‘Is accuracy … the most important criterion for selection? Or is style the final arbiter?’ Lu finds her answer in another of McEwan’s suggestions: ‘We know what we like when we taste it.’
The Best Australian Science Writing 2023 by Donna Lu
NewSouth, $32.99 pb, 328 pp
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