Mark Rubbo
Mark Rubbo is chairman of Readings. He is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and was founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2006 he was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia.
Blog post — 9 Nov 2022
Mark's Say, November 2022
A few weeks ago, some For Lease signs went up outside our Hawthorn shop, alarming many customers. Readings moved to Hawthorn in the early 1970s and has become a fixture…
Blog post — 5 Sep 2022
Mark's Say: September, 2022
The Melbourne Writers Festival is one of Australia’s oldest writers’ festivals. Launched in 1986, its first two years were held at the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street. Early guests included…
Review — 19 Sep 2022
Childhood by Shannon Burns
Hailing from the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth North, Shannon Burns’ parents were young and working class; for most of their lives they survived on welfare payments. His mother was the…
Blog post — 1 Aug 2022
Mark's Say: August, 2022
One of the organisations the Readings Foundation is proud to partner with is Western Chances, a non-profit that supports young students in Melbourne’s west with educational scholarships and life-changing opportunities…
Blog post — 8 Jun 2022
Mark's Say: June 2022
In the digital age, bookselling is often a rather thankless task; Jeff Bezos was able to use books as the springboard to create his empire because it was an industry…
Review — 28 Jul 2022
Motherlands by Amaryllis Gacioppo
There is no word for our English-language notion of home in Italian; the closest is ‘casa’, but that has the more literal meaning as the physical place where one lives…
Review — 29 May 2022
An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa
I hadn’t heard of Paul Dalla Rosa but then I noticed pre-orders for his debut, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, coming in. Not long after, at one of…
Blog post — 2 May 2022
Mark's Say: May, 2022
In 2001, to mark International Women’s Day, our events manager Chris Gordon organised a panel at Readings Carlton to discuss why women writers were largely overlooked when the major literary…
Blog post — 5 Apr 2022
Mark's Say: April, 2022
Pre-Covid, publishers would occasionally take booksellers out for drinks or dinner with one of their authors. Several years ago, Text Publishing had a function for Helen Garner. Sean O’Beirne, who…
Review — 14 Sep 2022
Lessons by Ian McEwan
One of the perks of being a bookseller is that you’re able to read books long before they are published. I read Lessons back in June and couldn’t stop telling…
