Emeritus Professor Andy Kirkpatrick FAHA
Griffith University
The Luck of the Bodkins
PG Wodehouse
I’d like, if I may, to cheat and nominate the works of PG Wodehouse as having a major influence on my life. If I have to restrict it to just one book, I’d choose ‘The Luck of the Bodkins’, not least because it contains one of the funniest paragraphs ever written in English. I quote it here: “into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
I can’t say that the books of PG Wodehouse changed my life. But what they have done and continue to do is to provide balm and cheer during those moments when a little rain has fallen into my life. Reading him is always uplifting and induces laughter to chase away those blues.
Dr Thao Phan
Recipient of the 2025 Max Crawford Medal
Selected Writing on Race and Difference
Stuart Hall
Every book changes the reader. The book that is currently changing me is a collection of essays from the eminent cultural theorist Stuart Hall titled ‘Selected Writing on Race and Difference’ (2021). This collection brings together writing from across Hall’s long career, spanning from the late 1950s to the early 2000s. It was compiled by his friends and colleagues Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Paul Gilroy, two scholars who similarly share Hall’s sensibility for activism, public scholarship, and understanding (in Gilroy’s words) “race as a prism” to understand the dynamics of our political moment. Through Hall I’m receiving a masterclass in not only the history of cultural studies as a discipline within the humanities, but also in how to be a scholar who is able to respond to social and cultural problems as they are unfolding.
Zoe Vaughan 
Administration Assistant – Australian Academy of the Humanities
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susanna Clarke
I feel every book has changed me somewhat; but a kneejerk response is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. A historical fantasy that reads like an Austen or Dickens pastiche, Clarke imagines England as the stage for a magical rivalry during the Napoleonic Wars. The story and world Clarke creates creeps up on you, until by the end of the 800 pages you find yourself ensnared and wanting more. I grew up on Rodda, Funke and Pullman; when I entered university, I found myself drifting from the fantasy genre under the impression I needed to “grow up and out of it”. Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell rekindled my love and admiration for the genre.
Alex Miller FAHA 
Author
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
“Jane Eyre reminds us of the simple, beautiful things in life and the power we hold within ourselves.” These are the words of my fifteen-year-old-granddaughter, Adrienne on Charlotte Bronte’s, Jane Eyre. I thought at once, here is all the evidence we need that young people are not being destroyed by social media but are still having their lives shaped by great fiction. What could be more important for World Book Day than to see the direct evidence of this?
Adrienne goes on to say, “It reminds us to observe the simple things, things that don’t take much to receive the benefits from. The effortless occurrences that we will never know how they came about and the reassurance in that, the acceptance of something larger than yourself. It shows us how peaceful the width of life is and portrays this gentleness in moments in the book, subtle moments of consideration, teaching us to receive the gift of the landscape and absorb the vibrance of life that surrounds us.”
Emeritus Fellow Colin Steele FAHA 
Australian National University
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
I am not sure that any one book can shape an individual, but certainly one book that influenced me, and perhaps led me into my future career as a librarian and lover of books, was Ray Bradbury’s 1953 publication Fahrenheit 451, which read it for the first time in the late 1950s. Later meeting Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles in 1992 was an added bonus.
The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman, who burns books on behalf of the state, who wish to suppress individual freedom of thought. Montag becomes increasingly disaffected in his role and flees to join the resistance movement ‘The Book People’, who have memorised many of the great works of literature and philosophy to preserve their content.
Fahrenheit 451 was influenced by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on Communism and banning “subversive” books in early 1950s America. This period now seems relatively restrained in comparison to Donald Trump’s widespread assault on civil liberties and his encouragement of special interest groups to censor books in American public libraries, a scenario so dramatically expanded in Fahrenheit 451.
Dr Nicholas Birns FAHA 
New York University
The Silmarillion
J.R.R. Tolkien
The book which changed me was JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Like many kids of my generation, I read and cherished The Lord of the Rings when I was 10 or so. When The Silmarillion was published posthumously in 1977, I welcomed it as part of the lore, but it did not much move me; as, fundamentally, it is not a book for 12-year-olds. Years later, when I had much more experience of the joys and sadnesses of life, The Silmarillion suddenly had new meaning: a series of tales, however fantastic in mien, of flawed people making often desperate choices, but trying to affirm moral values against impossible odds. It is often a bleak tableau; but its stories shed light on our emotional and ethical possibilities.
Sophie Chessell
Programs and Committees Coordinator – Australian Academy of the Humanities
Window 
Jeannie Baker
Window by Jeannie Baker is a children’s picture book. The story of a changing landscape seen through a window is told visually, there are no words. The author (artist really) is Jeannie Baker. She makes exquisite collages. Although it is a children’s book I discovered it as an adult. It was used as a resource in an education program for a historic house on the edge of Canberra, Mugga-Mugga, to illustrate for young children how the landscape would have changed. It was the first time I truly understood the power of visual art. I think about this book every time I look out a window and see a crane or a digger or leaves changing and think about how the view will look in the future and how it looked in the past.
