Sarah Kanowski

Sarah Kanowski is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. She is the new editor of Island magazine, the literary quarterly based in Tasmania and addressed to readers and writers across the world. Sarah has worked extensively at ABC Radio National, primarily on the Late Night Live, Saturday Extra, and Encounter programs. She holds a Masters of Philosophy in English Studies from Oxford University. Having begun life as a Queenslander, with time spent in Latin America, she wonders how much further south fate will carry her.

Sarah Kanowski reviews 'Tripping Over Feathers: Scenes in the life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams' by Peter Read

February 2010, no. 318 • 11 October 2022

Some stories are very familiar to us, as a society, stories whose ugly truths we seem to have accepted, may even have, belatedly, apologised for, but the story of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams, as told by Peter Read, reveals how much White Australia still has to learn about the complexity of our national past and the tragedy of its continuing legacy. Eileen Williams, three weeks after her birth in ... (read more)

Sarah Kanowski reviews 'The Singing' by Stephanie Bishop and 'The Patron Saint Of Eels' by Gregory Day

August 2005, no. 273 • 01 August 2005

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone ... (read more)

Sarah Kanowski reviews 'The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists' edited by Adrian Poole and 'The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel' edited by Robert L. Caserio

April 2011, no. 330 • 25 March 2011

While spying in Scotland in 1706, Daniel Defoe wrote a letter to the queen’s secretary of state explaining his technique: ‘I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way.’ In his energetic and instructive introduction to The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, Adrian Poole takes Defoe’s declaration as a neat summation of the novelist’s method. It was following the success of Robinson Crusoe ... (read more)