Jacqueline Kent – författare

Beatrice Davis, 1909-1992, was general editor at Angus and Robertson the main Australian publishing company from 1937 to 1973. There she discovered and published such writers as Thea Astley, Miles Franklin, Patricia Wrightson, Xavier Herbert and Hal Porter becoming a literary tastemaker in the process. A central figure in Australian literature – ‘respected, feared, courted and berated.’ Originally published to great acclaim in 2001, A Certain Style introduced this stylish and formidable woman to thousands of readers and told a history of books and publishing in twentieth-century Australia. This reissue has a new introduction and updates throughout as the author presents a compelling account of a contradictory woman and her times. Author Jacqueline Kent won the 2002 National Biography Award and the Nita B Kibble Award for A Certain Style, first published by Viking. Reissue has a new introduction reflecting on more recent publishing developments – onscreen editing, corporate mergers etc – that contrast with the highly masculine, pen-and-ink world Beatrice worked in. Jacquie is now a well-known journalist and excellent media performer. Her book The Making of Julia Gillard received a huge amount of coverage. A Certain Style will be a great companion to other classic nonfiction NewSouth has put back into print, including books by Henry Reynolds and Anne Summers. The name Beatrice Davis has currency because Australian Publishers’ Association runs a prestigious editorial fellowship named after her. Beatrice Davis was a judge of the Miles Franklin award from its inception and the last judge to have been appointed by Miles Franklin herself.

Australia’s crusaders for women’s voting rights and the radical feminists of the 1970s changed lives across the country and around the globe. But what about the generation in between?Throughout the twentieth century, a group of trailblazing women writers challenged the nation’s status quo. Miles Franklin’s forceful voice invigorated the emerging women’s movement, Mary Gilmore was a groundbreaking feminist journalist, and novelists Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark explored the colonial displacement of Australia’s Indigenous people. Kylie Tennant spoke up for battlers during the Depression. Dymphna Cusack, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Dorothy Hewett, all members of Australia’s Communist Party, advocated for social reform. Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South jolted the NSW government into developing slum clearance programs. And the work of First Nations poet and activist Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonuccal) was crucial in achieving constitutional reform for Indigenous peoples.Acclaimed biographer Jacqueline Kent traces these women’s stories, shaped by the seismic social and political events of their time, and illuminates their immense courage and principled determination to change the world.

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case that gripped 1970s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation. As Britain emerged from post-war austerity and headed towards the Swinging Sixties, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery.Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she feared that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women — and denying Ashley her husband’s inheritance. Instead, she blazed her own trail, rubbing shoulders along the way with the bohemians and jetsetters who had risen to prominence in the Swinging Sixties.Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley’s extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.