Everywhere I Look

Helen Garner

Apr 2016 · Bolinda · Narrated by Helen Garner

About this audiobook

I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there's a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring. Helen Garner is one of Australia's greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. Everywhere I Look includes Garner's famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.

About the author

Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong and educated at the University of Melbourne. She worked as a high school teacher until her first novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977. It was an instant success, winning a National Book Council award in 1978 and becoming a film in 1982. Since then she has written full-time, publishing novels, short stories, essays, journalism and long-form non-fiction. In 2006, Garner was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature, in 2016 the international Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, in 2019 the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and in 2020 the Lloyd O’Neil Award for Services to the Australian Book Industry at the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA). Most recently, Garner was awarded the 2023 ASA Medal by the Australian Society of Authors for her outstanding contribution to Australian culture.