In her new book,
A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century (UWA Publishing, 2018),
Ann-Marie Priest, a lecturer at Central Queensland University, explores the literary lives of four Australian women---Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead, and Ruth Park---who challenged the 20th-century notion of artist as distinctly male. Priest offers biographical and cultural insights into these pioneering women whose urgency to write (their "vocation") would not be denied.