page_title: Culture of Melbourne
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Culture of Melbourne / Arts / Literature
caption_attribution_description: Adam Lindsay Gordon Against a Background Appropriate for His Time
context_page_description: The culture of Melbourne, the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, encompasses the city's artistic, culinary, literary, musical, political and social elements. Since its founding as a British settlement in 1835, Melbourne has been culturally influenced by European culture, particularly that of the British Isles. During the 1850s Victorian gold rush and in the decades the immediately followed, immigrants from many other parts of the world, notably China and the Americas, helped shape Melbourne's culture. Over time, Melbourne has become the birthplace of a number of unique cultural traits and institutions, and today it is one of the world's most multicultural cities.
  Traditionally acclaimed as Australia's "cultural capital", Melbourne topped the Economist Intelligence Unit's annual ranking of the world's most liveable cities throughout much of the 2010s, based in part on its cultural attributes.
context_section_description: Melbourne's literary history is  rich and diverse. The State Library of Victoria was the first major cultural institution to be established in Melbourne since its founding in 1854, and is one of Australia's oldest cultural institutions. The library holds more than two million books and 16,000 serials, and is a part of an extensive network of public and university libraries across the city. A wide range of independent bookstores also exist in the city, as well as a variety of larger bookstore chains, and in 1960, the first children's bookstore in Australia, The Little Bookroom, was opened.  The Foreign Language Bookshop is the oldest and largest language bookshop in Australasia, established in 1938 in Bourke Street as a free lending library.  The primary aim of the business was to reduce migrant isolation, particularly for European migrants disembarking from ships into Australia.
  In the decades following the gold rush, Melbourne was Australia's undisputed literary capital, famously referred to by Henry Kendall as "that wild bleak Bohemia south of the Murray". During this time, Melbourne-based writers and poets Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcus Clarke, and Rolf Boldrewood produced classic visions of colonial life and created a nascent national literature.
  Melbourne's literary publishing sector is the largest in Australia, including the largest number of independent publishers, and presents two of Australia's most significant literary awards: the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Melbourne is the setting of many significant novels including Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), George Johnston's My Brother Jack (1964), Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977) and Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap (2008). The Mystery of a Hanson Cab was the best-selling detective novel of the 19th century. Garner's seminal 1977 novel Monkey Grip achieved notability for capturing Melbourne's burgeoning counter-culture and Bohemia scene, as well as the lives of communal single-mothers, junkies and artists living in sharehouses in the inner city neighbourhoods of Fitzroy and Carlton. It is now considered one of Australia's earliest and most important contemporary novels, with the BBC selecting it as one of "100 stories that shaped the world" – the only Australian novel on the list. Other contemporary writers from Melbourne include Kerry Greenwood, Germaine Greer, Stephanie Alexander, Tony Birch and Barry Dickins.
  The Melbourne Writers Festival was founded in 1986 and is an annual, two-week literary festival that hosts keynotes, panels and workshops by a wide range of local and international guests. Since beginning as a one-day zine fair in 2004, the Emerging Writers' Festival has expanded to ten days of events, workshops, and panel discussions that are focused on the development of writers. Annually across Melbourne there are many local writers’ festivals including the Bayside Literary Festival, Williamstown Literary Festival and Glen Eira Storytelling Festival. In addition to book readings by local authors, many of these events provide opportunities for local writers to develop their skills via workshops and short-story competitions.
  In August 2008, Melbourne was the second city in the world to be recognised as a City of Literature by UNESCO—the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas is a literary and publishing centre founded as part of Melbourne's successful bid. As well as programming literary events, debates and awards, the Wheeler Centre hosts literary organisations such as the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival, SPUNC, Australian Poetry, Express Media, Writers Victoria and the Melbourne City of Literature Office.
caption: Statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon in Gordon Reserve
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