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Anna Goldsworthy

Anna Goldsworthy is a pianist and writer. Her most recent book is Welcome to Your New Life. Her most recent album, Beethoven Piano Trios, was released in March.

Articles by this author

Image of Svetlana Alexievich
Nobel Prize–winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich brings together an extraordinarily diverse group of Russian voices
Beyond imagination
In Svetlana Alexievich’s book Voices from Chernobyl: The oral history of a nuclear disaster (1997), a photographer discusses the strange pull of the Exclusion Zone. “Mankind had...
 
Scaling the IVF mountain in Julia Leigh’s ‘Avalanche’
Sweet dark purpose
In Julia Leigh’s 2008 novella, Disquiet, a woman escapes a troubled marriage in Australia for her family chateau in France. Shortly after her arrival, her sister-in-law returns...
 
Helen Garner’s work collected in ‘Everywhere I Look’
Felled by grace
In one of the shorter pieces in her new nonfiction collection, Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing; $29.99), Helen Garner celebrates the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould: “JS...
 
Steven Avery
True crime and entertainment in Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer’
The art of manipulation
Sometimes, while giving workshops on life writing, I’ve had conversations that seem – at the very least – morally suspect. How much detail would best convey the marriage...
 
Has classical music become irrelevant?
The lost art of listening
Sometimes, while performing the Funeral March from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, I am struck by the fact that everyone in the auditorium is marching towards death...
 
Harvill Secker; $32.99
‘Dancing in the Dark’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Dancing in the Dark is the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s now infamous novel-memoir, My Struggle. It unfolds over the course of the Norwegian author’s 18th year, in which...
 
‘Transparent’
Seeing clearly
The title of Jill Soloway’s new comedy-drama series for Amazon Studios, Transparent, speaks of a desire to be seen as who you truly are. It also refers, literally, to a trans...
 
The Adelaide Zoo has a chequered past
A day at the zoo
When we visit the Adelaide Zoo, I usually have a destination in mind, but my two-year-old has his own agenda. It begins with the capybaras, the world’s largest rodents: doleful,...
 
Lena Dunham’s ‘Not That Kind of Girl’
The other kind
There are many things people hate about Lena Dunham, the young creator and star of the hit HBO series Girls: her privilege, her chubbiness, her unapologetic nudity, her on-screen...
 
Umeewarra Mission
In Port Augusta, an Israeli linguist is helping the Barngarla people reclaim their language
Voices of the land
In a bluestone former school building in Port Augusta, now a campus of the University of Adelaide, four generations of Barngarla people sit conference-style around a table. Harry...
 
Karl Ove Knausgaard. © Anders Hansson
The third volume of the epic autobiographical novel ‘My Struggle’
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘Boyhood Island’
My Struggle, the six-volume epic by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, has been described as both novel and memoir. His American publisher prefers “the project”. In...
 
 Warrego Highway, Miles, on the Western Downs. © Nicholas Purcell
A tour of instruments and their owners
Pianos of small-town Queensland
It is a promiscuous thing to be a pianist. Unless you are Vladimir Horowitz, your instrument is unlikely to travel with you, and so at each venue you must accustom yourself not...
 
Honourable failures
Musicians with a literary bent
There is a persistent quote that stalks all music writers. Its provenance is disputed – Thelonius Monk? Clara Schumann? Laurie Anderson? Elvis Costello? – but it is...
 
Christopher Pearson remembered
It was my birthday, and I was eating cake with my children, when my father arrived. “It’s Pop! How are you?” “Not so good actually.” He...
 
Sex, Freedom and Misogyny
Extract from Quarterly Essay 50, Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny, by Anna Goldsworthy. Out now. www.quarterlyessay.com   Q&A, broadcast on Monday...
 
Illustration by Jeff Fisher.
Vox
‘Welcome to Your New Life’ book extract
When you are six weeks old, your grandmother Mariah offers to babysit, so that Nicholas and I can venture out to a restaurant. We discuss this for some days: it is a curiously...
 
L–R: Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Jenny Macklin, Julia Gillard, Kate Lundy, Kate Ellis, Julie Collins. © Tim Bauer
Critical Mass
Julia Gillard and the women in cabinet
It is the first sitting week in parliament. Somewhere up north, a man draws lewd cartoons of the prime minister. It is compulsive, self-pleasuring behaviour. He simply cannot stop...
 
Paul Lewis. © Pia Johnson
Paul Lewis
Sleepwalking with Schubert
What is it about Schubert? There are so many composers to love. And so many ways to love them. Mozart: in your blood, that narcotic joy. Bach: the brainwaves flowing to theta....
 

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