EXCLUSIVE Sydney's elite caught out in the rain as socialite celebrates her 40th birthday with a wild dinner party- and everyone is saying the same thing about the soiree
There was Justin Hemmes' exclusive Silver Party just last weekend, swiftly followed by all the glamour of Sydney Fashion Week.
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The Sun
19 minutes ago
- The Sun
Home and Away star, Olympians and MAFS groom's ex sign up for revamped Celeb SAS as show shake up is revealed
CELEBRITY SAS have signed up THREE major stars for the next series of the show after a ground-breaking show twist was confirmed. The hit Channel 4 programme has been busy selecting its celebrity recruits for the seventh series of the show - with filming taking place in Morocco. 4 4 4 Earlier this week, The Sun told how in a huge new move the UK and Aussie editions would be merged with major stars from both countries coming together for the series which will be aired simultaneously on Channel 4 in the UK and the Seven Network in Australia. Now, we can exclusively reveal three of the stars who will be appearing on the next run. Home and Away hunk Axel Whitehead will be appearing on the show after rising to international fame for playing Liam Murphy on the show between 2009 and 2013. The actor also appeared briefly in fellow Aussie soap Neighbours in 2020. He will be joined by two Olympic swimmers - including one with a famous reality star ex. 29-year-old Swimming champ Mack Horton and fellow Olympian, Emily Seebohm will also be on the cast. Emily shares a child with MAFS heartthrob Ryan Gallagher although the pair are no longer together. Ryan is best known for his time on the hit reality show as well as his brief romance with Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby during their time on the Aussie version of I'm A Celebrity. A source told The Sun of the three latest recruits: 'Bosses are working hard to make sure they sign an exciting variety of Aussie talent for the new series because of the format change. 'Soap fans will be no stranger to Axel after his time in both Home and Away and Neighbours, so he's a great coup for the show. Watch as Celeb SAS Who Dares wins star Bianca Gascoigne QUITS show right at the very end of series 'And Olympic champions Emily and Mack are both extremely fit and strong after years of professional swimming. They're going to take the challenge very seriously.' Two other Aussies have so far been revealed for the programme including soap star and singer Natalie Bassingthwaite and Jessika Power, who rose to fame on Married At First Sight Australia. Jess has since relocated to England appearing on British shows including Celebs Go Dating and Celebrity Ex On The Beach. Other UK stars who are understood to have signed up for the next series include Love Island winner Dani Dyer and Strictly hunk and rugby player, Ben Cohen. Gladiators star Phantom AKA Toby Olubi will also be proving his stuff on the show alongside TikTok star Jack Joseph, 25. England cricketer Graeme Swann, Love Island champ Gabby Allen and TikTok star Cole Anderson James are also understood to be on the line-up. 4
The Guardian
19 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Miles Franklin 2025: your guide to the shortlist of Australia's biggest literary prize
All dull awards shortlist books that are alike; every important award recognises books that are remarkable in their own way. This is what makes them worth paying attention to, what makes following them fun – and this year's Miles Franklin award shortlist is no exception. All six books hail from different publishers. Each book is markedly different in genre, style and form. The self is an uncertain site in all these books – one where concepts like nationhood, sexuality, class and ethnicity are negotiated. There is a portrait of coming-of-age and Tongan community, a bawdy historical novel told by a self-styled horse thief, and an interlinked short-story cycle that turns on the omens and aftershocks of a serial killing. And three very different novels of ideas playfully reference other texts (as well as themselves) – and draw attention to how they are made. Notably, Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13 is the first work of linked stories to be shortlisted for the prize, which is awarded to 'the novel of the highest literary merit'. But the shortlist is not, curiously enough, diverse in length: none of the entries break 400 pages, though Burruberongal writer Julie Janson's Compassion comes close. 'I was never good at philosophy,' quips Abraham Quin, Chinese Postman's occasional narrator. After being humiliated by his philosophy tutor at university, he learns to see himself in the third person as well as the first, to move 'easily between the two'. This gives us the basic shape of Castro's narrative, which takes the form of a series of ruminations, in either Quin's voice or a close third-person perspective. So: philosophy's out. Quin is also 'through with all that novel-writing'. Despite this protest, Castro's book is best described as a philosophical novel or a novel of ideas. Chinese Postman is largely plotless, though Quin's email correspondence with a Ukrainian woman named Iryna Zarębina gives it a flexible spine. Quin has a penchant for maxims, particularly when their content is scatological. 'Shit', in his telling, is 'a symptom of lowly creation's failure to survive as gods'. It is, for him, a substance 'without hierarchy', in which 'All are equalised'. Reflections of this kind are Quin's way of 'composting' – rather than composing – his thoughts. For those who read for the sheer delight of allusive, tricky, irreverent sentences, Chinese Postman will be the most exciting work on the shortlist. Compassion is the shortlist's only realist historical novel. Set between the years 1836 and 1854, it is a story of maternal reconciliation and paternal reckoning told largely from the point of view of a Darug woman named Duringah, who escapes abuse and traverses Darkinjung and Awabakal country (as well as the country of many other clans and nations) in order to return home. Compassion is a sequel: it continues the dramatised life story of Janson's ancestors from her 2020 novel, Benevolence, which centred on Duringah's (now-estranged) mother, Muraging. In turning to Duringah, who takes up the alias Eleanor James, Compassion flirts with conventions drawn from an array of literary and popular genres, including colonial romance, revisionist history, melodrama and the picaresque. Duringah outwits and eludes colonial authorities with palpable glee. But Compassion has its heartfelt scenes, too. Duringah's arrival at a mission station, where Koori women sing a church hymn, serves as the occasion for a moment of reverence and some of Janson's best writing. Their voices, 'pure like bells', summon memories of 'singing the country with a corroboree'. Yet this memory culminates in a plea for quiet, lest their songs become a 'beacon for vengeful white men'. This tension – between the desire to speak up, and the risks of doing so – lies at the heart of Janson's truth-telling project. Winnie Dunn once remarked in an interview that she considers 'all forms of writing' to be 'autobiographical fiction'. This has clearly informed her work as an editor for the Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as well as her debut novel. Semi-autobiographical writing, as Dirt Poor Islanders well knows, always takes place in productive tension with the right to privacy – of the writer's family and their broader community. The novel's first chapter thinks this through when Dunn's Tongan-Australian avatar, Meadow Reed, locates her family members in the blotches, beauty spots and wrinkles on her grandmother's face. This intimate moment is promptly interrupted by their racist neighbour Shazza, who tells the pair to 'eff off to Fiji'. This suggests Dunn's keen awareness of the risk of telling stories grounded in personal experience before an ignorant, even hostile, audience. Dirt Poor Islanders refuses to be cowed by this risk. Like two of her clear influences, Melissa Lucashenko and Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Dunn responds by doubling down. Meadow unapologetically narrates scenes of cockroach eating and chicken plucking, force feeding and constipation, menstruation and childbirth. 'From nits having sex on my head', thinks Meadow, 'to maggots wriggling in lumps of lard to cockroaches crawling in cereal boxes and cushion crevices, I asked, 'Y'.' Dunn's answer? A sanitised self is barely half an identity – and 'No one could live as half of themselves'. Ghost Cities is an ingeniously structured novel that takes tyranny as its central theme. At its heart are two dictators – an emperor and a director – both prone to issuing capricious edicts to terrorise their hapless subjects. Both come to preside over labyrinthine cities, implied to be millennia apart. The emperor reigns over the Imperial City, the director over a ghost city named Port Man Tou, peopled by ill-paid actors. The cities are opposed, respectively, by Lu Shan Liang and Xiang Lu, whose names resemble their author's. The novel's wacky, erratic plot plays out across alternating chapters through two timelines, their narratives routinely contorted by the whims of their respective dictators. At one point, Xiang Lu mentions he is partway through Vladimir Nabokov's early novel, Invitation to a Beheading. Nabokov's burlesque of tyrannical logic is one of many texts Ghost Cities is in dialogue with. But Ghost Cities most strikingly resembles another Nabokov novel, Pale Fire. Both novels have a long poem at their centre (in loose iambic pentameter); both feature half-comic assassination attempts. They share an ear for the comedy of translation and an eye for the absurd. Ghost Cities both embraces and defies its emperor's directive to abandon 'the pursuit of beauty' for art that favours 'furrowed brows and scholar-like interpretation'. In its zany intertextuality, it displays a level of intellectual ambition rarely found in recent fiction. The 12 stories that make up Highway 13 are all loosely connected to a single man, Paul Biga, the perpetrator of a series of brutal highway murders, whose facts reference (but don't mirror) those of the convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, arrested in 1994. Interestingly, Highway 13 is the only book shortlisted not to make extensive use of first-person narration. The settings range from 1950 to 2028, and span Australia, the US and Europe. They extend a preoccupation with the uncanny that runs through McFarlane's body of work. Stylistically, McFarlane errs on the side of minimalism. These are stories of considerable subtlety and restraint. Highway 13 endeavours to surprise – not at the level of the individual sentence, but in what its sentences imply. It invites us to notice: when the bodies of stink beetles are dumped in a garden corner where 'ants had made feasts of the softer flesh', we can't help but see in their decomposing corpses the shadow of a crime. Highway 13 is more concerned with the murders' distant precursors (in the lives of others) and long-term ramifications (the way it resurfaces after the event) than in finding narrow causes. It tactfully avoids too-obvious parallels between the fictional Paul Biga and real Ivan Milat. In these ways, McFarlane creates space for her marvellous collection to linger with the living, with those bound to each other in their respective presents by fragile forms of love. Theory and Practice takes place primarily in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1986. It is narrated by a female university student, unnamed for most of the novel, who is writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf. 'Theory', she observes with distaste, has 'conquered the humanities', especially the English department where she studies. When compelled to read theorists, rather than the novels she loves, she feels 'headachey and crushed'. Even the work of feminist and postcolonial theorists, which she draws on to help explain her life as a Sri Lankan woman from Sydney, leaves her ambivalent. 'Practice', on the other hand, describes her life as it is lived. In this novel, practice decidedly wins. The narrator is vexed by casual lovers – she is having an affair with a fellow student in a 'deconstructed relationship' – and hypocritical professors. She's also outraged by a diary entry in which Woolf describes Ceylonese freedom fighter EW Perera as a 'poor little mahogany coloured wretch'. Theory and Practice is at its best when it embraces its title's distinction, which it elsewhere compellingly glosses as the distinction between 'realism and reality', through a cast of characters adept at talking their way out of our attempts to interrogate them. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 24 July This article was originally published by the Conversation. Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest foundation postdoctoral fellow in English and literary studies at the University of Western Australia
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Three ways to get celebs' looks for less and still be as stylish as Alexa Chung
CELEBRITIES have wardrobes most of us can only dream of. However, you don't always need a bulging budget to copy their style. 8 If you're inspired by outfits from an A-lister, here's how to get the look for less . . . BUY THEIR STUFF: Just like the rest of us looking to make some quick cash, many high-profile figures sell off their preloved items on second-hand sites. This gives fans a great opportunity to stock their wardrobe at a cut price. Style setter Alexa Chung recently sold off items from her closet on Vinted, with her things listed from £35. You can also buy items from reality stars Molly-Mae Hague, Georgia Toffolo, Ferne McCann and Katie Price on the app. Just follow your favourite celebrities on apps and you'll see when they release goods for sale. DUPE IT: If you spot a celeb wearing an outfit you like, chances are that it has a designer price tag. However, you can use website to find a similar product for less. You can put in the URL web address of the item if you know exactly where it's from, or upload a picture if you just like the look of something worn by a celeb. Either way, will show you cheaper options. OUTLET: If you want to get your hands on gear from a celeb's favourite designer, you may be able to find some cheap ones through outlet stores. Many top designers sell off previous collections with deep discounts through special outlet shops. I've made £5.6k on Vinted and here are the 7 items you need to upload now to make cash quick - white maxi skirts will sell instantly for a start These stores are usually grouped together so you can make a day of shopping for cut-price labels. Bicester Village in Oxfordshire is home to top names including Gucci, Saint Laurent and The White Company. You can also head to the O2 in London for discounts on top brands including Adidas and Kate Spade. Or McArthurGlen, which has shopping centres dotted around the UK, features designer discount stores. All prices on page correct at time of going to press. Deals and offers subject to availability. 8 Deal of the day 8 KICK back in your outdoor space with this set of two sunloungers. It is reduced from £80 to £45 at Cheap treat TUCK into this Flair pistachio Dubai chocolate cake bar, £1.50, from Iceland. Top swap PRIME and illuminate your skin with Charlotte Tilbury's Hollywood Flawless Filter foundation, £39 from Or save some cash with MCoBeauty Flawless Glow, £13 from Superdrug. Shop & save BAG this F&F at Tesco tiered midi dress for £15, down from £29.50. PLAY NOW TO WIN £200 8 JOIN thousands of readers taking part in The Sun Raffle. Every month we're giving away £100 to 250 lucky readers - whether you're saving up or just in need of some extra cash, The Sun could have you covered. Every Sun Savers code entered equals one Raffle ticket.
