I gulped this book down as a 13-year-old and have read it again and again as an adult. It’s the blistering honesty of it, and the passion to be who you really want to be – despite the world telling you to be something else. Throughout my life I’ve held on to its lessons, so many! About following your heart into creativity and being courageously your true self, to name a few. Bravo to the 19-year-old Stella (real name) who wrote this short, sharp shock of a book.

What a cool, clear operator Ms St John was. This one was Booker shortlisted and deservedly so. It’s a tale of love and loss in London from an Aussie far from home. As you read it you can’t help thinking of the author in her tiny Notting Hill flat, typing away in the alien cold and damp. But what a clear-eyed observer of the complexities of love, and of the jarring differences between men and women. I laughed and cried. It’s a novel that’s stayed with me from an author who was under-appreciated in her home country.

Oh wonderful, playful, singular Les! He was a poet in thrall to the world and was robbed of his Literature Nobel by some crooner from Minnesota. Everything Les observed was varnished by his poetry, and so often his wit. ‘The Atlantic’ magazine described him as “the world’s greatest poet”. I agree. ‘Continuous Creation’ was published posthumously and is an intensely moving final surprise from the closest we got to an Australian poet laureate. It’s a stunning gift of last poems that range across the breadth of Les’s life. “Words are poor people’s treasure,” he said once, and that dear man left us treasures in abundance.