Compulsive Reader News
maggieball@compulsivereader.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com
Volume 29, Issue 9, 1 Sept 2026

IN THIS ISSUE

New Reviews at Compulsive Reader
Literary News
Competition News
Sponsored By
Coming soon

Hello readers. Happy September. Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by publisher Ted Olczak for his Printed Word ANZ special issue and we spoke about many things relating to poetry, publishing in general and specifically publishing poetry in Australia, the review ‘scene’, and a lot more. You can read the whole interview here: https://www.independentpressaward.com/subscribe

Here are the latest batch of reviews and interviews:

A review of The Badge Between Us by Terrence P. Dwyer

As a New York State Trooper, Terrence Dwyer spent more than two decades involved in criminal investigations. Now a university professor of legal studies at Western Connecticut State University and an attorney consulting on law enforcement issues and the author of Homeland Security Law: Issues and Analysis, Terrence Dwyer writes with real authority on the issues of crime and policing. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/31/a-review-of-the-badge-between-us-by-terrence-p-dwyer/

A review of The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eaki

As an undergraduate during those heady years Emily Eakin was caught up in the excitement. Her The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, part memoir and part history of ideas, is a lively look back at that time when critical theories largely imported from France seemed poised to make a clean sweep of American intellectual life. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/28/a-review-of-the-frenchmen-or-my-life-in-theory-by-emily-eakin/

A review of Oppression by Judith Skillman

Judith Skillman’s Oppression contains language—rich, allusive, and whip-smart, filled with mordant humor—that is easy enough to parse. What makes the poems so difficult, so oppressive, however, is the profound and wrenching emotional weight they carry. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/26/a-review-of-oppression-by-judith-skillman/

A review of Sad City by Craig Kite

Kite is a poet, musician and actor and has worked as a journalist and in human rights domestically and all over the world. All of these experiences inform his writing and bring an authenticity, edge and poignancy to the work. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/23/a-review-of-sad-city-by-craig-kite/

A review of Katabasis by Paul Juhasz

Juhasz exhibits his intimate but troubled relationship with words throughout the book. His katabasis consists of lived experience. Words cannot do it justice, yet they provide necessary tools to make meaning. Juhasz writes in a literary register, typically employing sentence syntax and grammatical subordination instead of compressed poetic lines. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/20/a-review-of-katabasis-by-paul-juhasz/

A review of This Much is True by Katherine A. Sherbrooke

Sherbrooke deftly portrays trauma as something that can fracture identity, creating a painful divide between Veronica’s outward appearance and her private experience. She feels guilt as a wife and fear as a mother while carrying the shame of the teenage girl she once was, often referring to her younger self as though she were a separate person. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/18/a-review-of-this-much-is-true-by-katherine-a-sherbrooke/

A review of Defensible Spaces by Michael F Drummy

Michael Drummy’s new collection of bittersweet poems, Defensible Spaces. The silly years of youth have passed, and the late summer flowers are waving. Sobriety is our watchword as twilight approaches. The poet’s eye is taking it all in. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/15/a-review-of-defensible-spaces-by-michael-f-drummy/

Cathedrals of Mind: a review of saint of by Lisa Marie Basile

Aside from suffering devastation of home, illness, and severe bodily injury Basile continued to write and explore her craft. The poems are acts of resistance against the tyranny of pain and self-inflicted guilt. By sublimating her treacherous moments in language of ritual and metaphor, Basile restores her balance and defines the life she deserves as psychic trauma is expunged. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/13/cathedrals-of-mind-a-review-of-saint-of-by-lisa-marie-basile/

A review of Forever Mistaken for Ourselves by Jenny Grassl

While Grassl doesn’t define women (who can), her collection captures the essence of women’s spiritual and metaphysical being. She portrays women as part druid, animal, spirit, land and water, in short, women full of desire, capability, and knowledge. The collection presents women in their endless poetic variety of roles, shapes, sizes, forms, connections. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/11/a-review-of-forever-mistaken-for-ourselves-by-jenny-grassl

A review of Conversations in a Cafe by Nadia Janice Brown

Despite being a collection of poems, the book doesn’t sound monotonous and is full of various themes and styles, which Brown has complemented with quotes and images in several instances. These intertextual elements did not just come off as random ways to break from the poems but relevantly complemented the book’s overall theme. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/09/a-review-of-conversations-in-a-cafe-by-nadia-janice-brown/

A review of Egrets, While War by Tishani Doshi

In the title poem of her new collection, Tishani Doshi juxtaposes violence with timeless endurance, patient resolution with destruction, almost like a manifestation of Shiva, the creator/destroyer god of Hinduism. She writes about the ongoing “dirge of loss recovery / loss loss loss,” but assures us that “Our task is to march on.” Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/07/a-review-of-egrets-while-war-by-tishani-doshi/

We Bombed in New Haven; Alamogordo, New Mexico; in Hiroshima, too: A review of Trinity by Emily Seyl

Seyl, a science writer and editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, has organized a coffee table book to end all coffee table books. Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test, replete with more than 300 carefully restored photographs, maps, blueprints, and formerly top-secret documents, goes where no book has gone before. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/06/we-bombed-in-new-haven-alamogordo-new-mexico-in-hiroshima-too-a-review-of-trinity-by-emily-seyl/

A review of Mirage of Burning Things by Ryan Di Francesco

If you’re looking for poetry that explores the dystopia we’ve woken up in, poems that remind us we’re all animals even when we write and dream, Mirage of Burning Things will be affirming, even as it releases you as disturbed as when you arrived. Parlyaree Press is winking, knowing we’re all on the platform, but the trains have stopped running. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/05/a-review-of-mirage-of-burning-things-by-ryan-di-francesco/

A review of Neolithic Imaginings by Loralee Clark

This is a vast and ambitious collection which is totally imaginative and unlike anything I have read. After reading Neolithic Imaginings, I look at the night sky wondering about my place in that sky and my connection to those who stood full of hope among the stones, dwarfed by their immeasurable mystery and beauty. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/04/a-review-of-neolithic-imaginings-by-loralee-clark/

A review of Good Girl by Holly Coleman

This is a chapbook to read aloud, to read to a lover, or to read alone as an act of self-pleasure. In her essay(s), Coleman strives for clarity as she navigates the strict rules of syntax she must master in order to go free—she is a woman expected to say certain tame things who instead writes the forbidden correctly. Read more: https://compulsivereader.com/2026/08/03/a-review-of-good-girl-by-holly-coleman/

All of the reviews and interviews listed above are available at The Compulsive Reader on the front page. Older reviews and interviews are kept indefinitely in our extensive categorised archives (currently at 3,793) which can be browsed or searched from the front page of the site.

LITERARY NEWS

In the news this month, Daniel Schonning has won the 2026 Four Quartets Prize for his collection As When Waking (University of Chicago Press). Sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the prize celebrates the multipart poem and is awarded for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in the U.S. in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book. Judges also selected Juliana Spahr for “scotch broom” from Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press) and Annie Wenstrup for The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press) as finalists. Schonning receives US$20,000, and each finalist gets US$1,000.

The world’s leading prize for a work of history written or translated into English, the Cundill History Prize, has announced its longlist of fifteen books for 2026, chosen from almost 400 submissions from across the world. The US$75,000 Cundill History Prize is administered by McGill University, and the longlist can be seen here: https://www.cundillprize.com/news/the-2026-cundill-history-prize-longlist. A shortlist will be released on September 2 and the finalists September 30. The winner will be named on October 23.

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has announced the winners and honor recipients of the 2026 Crystal Kite Awards, recognizing outstanding books created by SCBWI members across fifteen international regions. Unique among literary honors, the Crystal Kite Awards are peer-voted, making them a meaningful accolade within the children’s book community.

Each winning title showcases exceptional storytelling, imaginative illustration, and creative excellence, representing the very best of children’s literature produced by SCBWI members worldwide.Find the full list here: https://www.scbwi.org/society-of-children-s-book-writers-and-illustrators-announces-winners-of-the-2026-crystal-kite-awards

Multi-talented author, poet, artist, and rapper Omar Musa has taken out this year’s $A60,000 Miles Franklin Award - Australia’s most prestigious literary prize for Fierceland, which follows 2 siblings who head back to Malaysian Borneo to deal with the legacy of their late father. It’s Musa’s second novel and it took him 6 years to write. The Miles Franklin Award was first awarded in 1957, after it was set up in Franklin’s will. You can listen to my interview with Musa just after his album The Fullness came out here – we talk mostly about the album but he does mention his work on the novel. It’s always fun to listen back and hear about an author’s processes while they’re writing a book that later wins big prizes:

The shortlist in six categories has been released for the 2026 James Cropper Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing, which celebrates nature, conservation, and environmental writing, spotlighting “the growing genre of nature writing and inspire readers to connect more deeply with the natural world.” Winners will be named at an awards ceremony on September 17. In addition to the six individual category winners, two titles will be honored as the overall winners: one for adult writing and one for children’s writing. These will be chosen from the respective category winners and will be celebrated as the Wainwright Prize Book of the Year and the Wainwright Children’s Prize Book of the Year. Both overall winners will receive £2,500, with the remaining category winners each awarded £500. Check out the shortlisted titles here: https://wainwrightprize.com/news/wainwright-prize-2026-shortlists-announced/

The shortlist for the 2026 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards has been announced. There were 673 entries across six literary categories: fiction, non-fiction, young adult literature, children’s literature, poetry, and Australian history. The shortlisted authors for fiction are: In the Name of the Trees by Merlinda Bobis, A Piece of Red Cloth by Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru, Arborescence by Rhett Davis, The Immigrants: Fabula Mirabilis, or A Wonderful Story by Moreno Giovannoni, and Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm. For poetry, Kontra by Eunice Andrada, The Rot by Evelyn Araluen, Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan, How to Emerge by Jill Jones, and Ghost of Myself by John Kinsella. You can see the whole list here: https://creative.gov.au/news-events/news/announcing-shortlist-2026-prime-ministers-literary-awards Winners will be announced on Thursday 10 September 2026 at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Winners receive A$80k per category, and up to four shortlisted entries in each category receive A$k.

Winners were announced for the 2026 Aurora Awards, which recognize excellence by Canadians in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. This year’s Aurora Awards, nominated and voted on by members of the Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association, were presented in a livestreamed ceremony. See the complete list of category winners here: https://www.csffa.ca/2026/08/2026-aurora-awards/

Helen Ennis’s ‘intricate portrait’ of Max Dupain has won this year’s $A25,000 National Biography Award. Max Dupain: A portrait was published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The $A5000 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work was awarded to Micaela Sahhar for her memoir, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family (NewSouth Publishing), a ‘profound contribution to contemporary life writing’. The Award is supported by the State Library of NSW Foundation.

The longlist has been selected for the €25,000 2026 German Book Prize. The shortlist will be announced September 8, and the winner named October 5, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair. See the 20 novels on the longlist here: https://www.deutscher-buchpreis.de/en/nominated/

When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift has won the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year.

Continental Drift: Stories by Tim Bascom (Mint Hill Books) has won the 2026 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Fiction, sponsored by Washburn University’s Center for Kansas Studies, the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at the University Library and the Friends of the Library. The award will be presented September 24, the day before the annual Kansas Book Festival on the Washburn University campus.

The State Library of NSW announced the shortlists for the 2026 NSW History Awards. Fourteen judges considered 208 entries across six prize categories, with a total of A$85,000 in prize money on offer. You can read more about these awards and find the full list here: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/awards/nsw-history-awards#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=e4f4a9be-a269-4be8-b335-7d152f9c0000&msdynmkt_prefill=mktprff9a58e519a344005a2805167af98ea1eeoprf

A shortlist has been released for the 2026 Laurel Prize, which recognises “the best collection of nature or environmental poetry to highlight the climate crisis and raise awareness of the challenges and potential solutions at this critical point in our planet’s life.” The prize was founded by Simon Armitage in 2019. This year’s shortlisted titles are: Midden Witch by Fiona Benson, Ethnology by Cathy Galvin, Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne, Tipping Point by Jane Lovell, and The Storm’s Flora by Laura Wainwright. The winner, who will be named on September 25, receives £5k and a four-night writing retreat in Mid Wales from prize partner Write Within. The other four finalists get £1k each.

A shortlist has been released for the New Adult Book Prize, which was founded last year by the Bookseller to “recognize and affirm new adult fiction as an established space for books that celebrate the joys and challenges of early adulthood.” It is run in partnership with the Cheltenham Literature Festival. The list includes: Among the Burning Flowers by Samantha Shannon, Dawn of the Firebird by Sarah Mughal Rana, Swept Away by Beth O’Leary, And Now, Back to You by B.K. Borison, Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley, It Might Never Happen by Emily Slapper, Sugartown by Caragh Maxwell, The Merge by Grace Walker, Hekate by Nikita Gill, and The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo. The shortlisted authors will appear at Cheltenham Literature Festival as part of its VOICEBOX program on October 11, when the winner will also be named.

A shortlist has been released for the 2026 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, “recognizing novels that combine compelling storytelling, unforgettable characters and a truly distinctive voice, regardless of genre.” The winner, who receives both £2k and an engraved glass bell, will be named on October 1. This year’s shortlisted titles are: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Names by Florence Knapp, The Rush by Beth Lewis, Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor, and Buckeye by Patrick Ryan.

Mimi Kawahara’s Disaster preparedness test, ex post facto won the 2026 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. Founded and organized by the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid, Spain, the award is “an international attempt to provide a holistic framework of opportunities for writers of innovative and boundary-pushing short fiction.” As winner, Kawahara receives €2k, a week-long residency at the Civitella Ranieri artists’ retreat in Umbria, Italy, and a manuscript assessment of up to 60,000 words through the Literary Consultancy. The runners up--Eric Baker for This History of Violence and Emily Roese for Slug--each receive €1k, while all three writers will have a consultation with a literary agent from Johnson & Alcock.

Shortlists for the 2026 Ned Kelly Awards have been released. Sponsored by the Australian Crime Writers Association, the awards honor works in the categories of best crime fiction, true crime, and international crime fiction, as well as debut crime fiction. Winners will be named in September. Find the full list here: https://www.austcrimewriters.com/2026-shortlists

Have a great month.

COMPETITION NEWS

Congratulations to Pauline Armstrong who won a copy of Farhang Book Two by Patrick Woodcock.

Congratulations also to Beth Spencer who won a copy of Mandatory Sentence by Jennifer Maiden.

Our new giveaway is for a copy of Living with Strangers: Healing a Wounded Heart in a Distant Land by Robin Rosenblut. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Living with Strangers” and your postal address in the body of the email.

We also have a copy of Days & Chances by Joanna Klink. To win, send me an email at maggieball@compulsivereader.com with the subject line “Days & Chances” and your postal address in the body of the email.

If you want to enter for both books just send one email with the subject line “Strangers and Days” and I’ll put you into the draw for both.

Good luck!

SPONSORED BY

Receive recognition for your book! 

Independent Press Award accepts books from all authors and publishers—except the Big 5—in 150 categories, recognizing excellent books.

Final deadline is December 15th, https://independentpressaward.com, winners announced in the new year.

Big Book Award and deadlines August 15th, https://www.nycbigbookaward.com, in

Simon & Schuster’s Former Publisher, Hollywood Executive, Famous Actress & Screenplay writer and lots of publishing experts you can meet with at BookCAMP, https://www.ipabookcamp.com

For more information, contact Ted Olczak, Ted@GabbyBookAwards.com or +1 (718) 938-4590.

Get recognized and have your winning title published in Printed Word Reviews magazine: https://www.printedwordreviews.com/.

COMING SOON

We will shortly be featuring reviews of In the Shadows of Service by Cynthia Hamilton Urquhart, Dreamboat by Jeffrey Skinner, Man Overboard by Kathleen Rooney, Reckonings by Thomas Farber and lots more reviews and interviews.

Drop by Compulsive Reader talks (see the widget on right-hand side of the site) to listen to our latest episode which features Elizabeth Walton reading from and talking about her poetry book How to Read a City. Click here:

to listen on Spotify or search for Compulsive Reader Talks on your favourite podcast platform.

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(c) 2026 Magdalena Ball. Please feel free to forward and share this newsletter in its entirety.

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