Trent Dalton’s Love Stories review – a stage adaptation that grabs you by the heart

Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), BrisbaneFrom the team that brought Boy Swallows Universe to the theatre comes a new work that tells a city’s worth of stories – and packs an emotional punchFor two months during the pandemic, the Australian author Trent Dalton lugged a sky blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter to a busy Brisbane street corner and invited strangers to tell him a love story. A sentimental, slightly absurd stunt – and one that could have gone very wrong. But Dalton, ever the charmer, has a way of finding the extraordinary in the everyday.The result was Love Stories, a book brimming with intimate confessions, grand gestures and all the messy business of being human. Now, in a stage adaptation for Queensland Performing Arts Centre, adapted by Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong, those stories don’t just leap from the page – they explode with theatrical spectacle

Intrigue, desire … and awful landlords: why queer authors are suddenly writing about houses

‘I think it’s an investigation of belonging – one that we didn’t have a literal space for before.”I’m on the phone with the novelist Yael van der Wouden, conferring with her about a recent trend in LGBTQ+ writing: a preoccupation with houses. I figured she would be a good person to talk to because her new novel The Safekeep centres on a lonely old house in the Dutch countryside that suddenly, one summer, is flooded with queer desire and intrigue. The problem is that the Booker-shortlisted author is talking to me in transit, touring Europe, at this moment on a train rattling across northern Italy. Reader, witness the irony of our discussing ideas of rootedness and belonging as Van der Wouden keeps getting ousted from her seat

Fifteen architecture firms shortlisted for NSW competition aimed at alleviating housing crisis

More than a dozen architecture firms from across Australia and overseas will vie to design homes for five Sydney sites set aside by the New South Wales government to help alleviate the state’s housing crisis.The 15 finalists in the government’s pattern book design competition were announced on Monday, culled from the portfolios and expressions of interest of more than 200 entries.Although pattern books to build mass housing have been sporadically used since colonial times, this is the first time the NSW government and not private enterprise has been the instigator. The idea behind a pattern book for building is to provide a fast track for construction by pre-approving selected designs, thereby cutting through red tape and lengthy development applications.After submitting site-specific designs in October, five winners will be selected to build their low- and medium-rise designs across the five metropolitan sites, of which only one has so far been revealed – Sydney Olympic Park

Last surviver of the Bloomsbury Group? Meet David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, 1972

In 1972, the Observer encountered one of a near-extinct species: Bloomsbury Group survivor writer David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, nearly perishing in the process, thanks to Garnett’s hair-raising driving. ‘“You drive with great imagination,” I said faintly,’ journalist Ruth Hall reported when Garnett collected her for an overnight stay at his cobwebby, dead-fly-infested French farmhouse.It’s a funny, affectionate portrait of a man who ‘retains an incredible “niceness” – there is no other word for it’. Beret-clad Garnett, then 80, was an attentive if eccentric host, frying potatoes, stoking the fire and plying Hall with walnut cake and a bespoke hotwater bottle fashioned from a beer bottle. He was modestly embarrassed to be interviewed, offering an alternative: ‘I’ve prepared a List of the Best and Worst Things in Life

On my radar: Mo Gilligan’s cultural highlights

Born in south London in 1988, the comedian and TV presenter Mo Gilligan started doing standup aged 19 and attracted wider attention with a series of viral sketches on YouTube. That landed him a co-hosting gig on The Big Narstie Show on Channel 4, followed by The Lateish Show With Mo Gilligan, for which he won Baftas in 2020 and 2022. He has also appeared as a judge on The Masked Singer UK. Gilligan, who lives in London, has just launched a podcast called Beginning, Middle and End, and he is currently touring the UK.Track Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness by George the PoetI started reading this on tour and I felt like it was speaking directly to me

Trust hopes to turn William Blake’s cottage into a museum

In the early months of 1800, while living in Lambeth, William Blake found himself at the bottom of a “deep pit of melancholy, melancholy without any reason for it”.A change of environment was imperative. So when landed gentleman and patron of the arts William Hayley invited Blake to spend a few days on the Sussex coast, the poet, painter and printmaker agreed, hoping the sea breeze would raise his spirits and stimulate his imagination.Blake and his wife, Catherine, rented a 17th-century cottage in Felpham, a small country village with a population of 500 inhabitants, where they lived for three years until 1803. It was here that Blake wrote his epic poem Milton, the preface to which was set to music and became the hymn Jerusalem, considered to be an alternative English national anthem