Delia Falconer – författare

As I set out from the city’s southern end, the sandstone walls beneath the Central railway line still held the day’s heat … I passed a row of old terraces where feral banana trees had colonised the tiny courtyards behind them, and walked on, past the smell of Thai food, up dirty William Street … The moon rose from the invisible harbour into a sky of such deep royal blue it was almost hard to believe in. The street smelled of low tied. For all its beauty, the city could return in an instant to pulp. And that thought was strangely cheering. Sydney has always been the sexiest and brashest of our cities, but perhaps the most misunderstood. In this new edition of Sydney – part of the classic City Series – Delia Falconer conjures up its sandstone, humidity and jacarandas, its fireworks, glitz and magic. But she discards lazy stereotypes to reveal a complex city: beautiful, violent, half-wild, and at times deeply spiritual. Beginning with her childhood in a decaying ’70s Sydney, caught between a faded Art Deco age and mega development, Falconer intertwines her own stories with the wellsprings of the city’s history and its literary past. Melancholic, moving and funny — Sydney is about its people: mad clergymen, amateur astronomers, Indigenous weather experts, crims and victims, photographers and artists, thinkers and dreamers. Falconer’s Sydney is intensely atmospheric and seductive. Now with a new Afterword in which Falconer ponders the city’s twentyfirst century transformations – might it have become a softer, nicer place? Will it be able to withstand the real presence of climate change? – and her own. Ranges over the history and different moods of Australia’s oldest citySydney was first published in 2010 as part of the classic NewSouth City SeriesEvocative and atmospheric writing, acclaimed as a dazzling literary achievementCombines memoir, history and journalismMajor title in bestselling City Series where leading writers of fiction and non-fiction reflect on their home city now available once moreBilled as ‘travel books where no-one leaves home’Delia Falconer is a bestselling novelist, prize-winning essayist and criticNew edition of an acclaimed classic with a new AfterwordIn new Afterword author reflects on the changes to her own life now that she has children, and the changes to the city, daring to ask if Sydney might be losing its hard edgesGrapples with the reality of climate change, from a long season of drought to a city choking in bushfire smokeMajor advertising and publicity campaigns to support re-release of all the books in the City Series

Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards. Chosen as a 2021 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review.The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed. In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change. Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind? Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now. ‘Only the finest of writers can hope to convey the mercurial nature of the times we are living though: the sense of slippage; of terror and beauty. Falconer is such a writer. Signs and Wonders is an essential collection.’ Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees ‘Delia Falconer is one of the best writers working today, and in Signs and Wonders she demonstrates everything that makes her writing so necessary. Brave, beautiful, and breathtaking in its elegance and intelligence, it is, quite simply, a marvel.’ James Bradley ‘Scintillating. Delia Falconer is at the peak of her powers as a critic, and as an observer of the natural world. Signs and Wonders looks outward from Sydney, and from literature, to trace the contours of our environmental moment.’ Rebecca Giggs, author of Fathoms ‘Exquisite … From reflections on feeding birds, analyses of literary trends, to Falconer’s Covid and fire diaries, the essays are complex, ambitious, rewarding … Delia Falconer’s mesmerising Signs and Wonders helps us to process the disorienting complexity of living in this time of great beauty and loss.’ Jonica Newby, Australian Book Review