Following the sell-out success of a five-week pop-up in Sydney, The School of Life founded in London eight years ago by philosopher Alain de Botton is opening a permanent local branch on July 25. Eleanor Gammell, director of The School of Life Sydney, says, "There is an appetite to tap into emotional intelligence and understand bigger issues such as loneliness, anxiety and creativity. We present everything in a casual, playful tone but it is serious and rigorous underneath." Tickets for the first three-month program go on sale on Monday and events include how-to classes on love, death, work, conversation, resilience; cultural workshops on storytelling as therapy, mindfulness and meditation; special events on music, sex and empathy, and philosophy salons and brunches. The popular private bibliotherapy sessions held by Susan Elderkin at Sydney Writers' Festival are now available with local bibliotherapist Germaine Leece, who can prescribe reading to suit your personal needs. The Sydney school has a faculty of 15 academics and other experts, with a classroom in Castlereagh Street, and events at various venues. The School of Life has 12 international campuses, with another in Melbourne. De Botton, who is also the best-selling author of books including How Proust Can Change Your Life, will speak about his novel The Course of Love and how Romantic notions of love are at odds with modern relationships, at Sydney Opera House on July 9-10 (and also in Melbourne, where the first Australian School of Life opened in 2014).

SAVE AUSTRALIAN STORIES

Public hearings at the Productivity Commission in the past two weeks made it clear the government has decided to lift restrictions on parallel import of books despite eloquent opposition from the local industry and authors. If the government is re-elected today, details will be worked out after the commission's final report in August. South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon spoke against an open market on Monday at a bookshop in Adelaide, where Griffin Press (which prints many Australian books) sees its 105 employees at risk with 20,000 jobs at risk nationally. Also there was Louise Adler, president of the Australian Publishers Association, whose company MUP will publish a free book, #SaveOzStories, with contributions by writers Richard Flanagan, Tim Winton, Geraldine Brooks, Andy Griffiths, Charlotte Wood, Morris Gleitzman, and others. She quoted from Gleitzman's essay: "Territorial copyright is a piece of chook wire over the culture and the literature of Australia." You can pick up a copy with The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age on Saturday, August 13, and at bookshops.

CAPITAL CONFERENCE ON LITERATURE

Anyone can register to attend events at the conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in Canberra on July 6-9. Indigenous writing is a strong theme with keynote speeches by novelist Melissa Lucashenko and American Professor Chadwick Allen, author of influential works on bridging Native American, Maori, Aboriginal and other indigenous literatures. Poet Michael Farrell and others will speak on the Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty and writer Anita Heiss​ is both a speaker and a subject. Capital cities are another focus, and Sydney gets attention in papers on contemporary fiction and Eleanor Dark's novel Waterway, about a ferry disaster. Artist, writer and zine-maker Vanessa Berry will talk about Ruth Park's 1973 classic, The Companion Guide to Sydney, as an invitation to readers to reenact her walks through the city. There are readings by Omar Musa, Fiona Wright, Geoff Page and others. And the winner of the ALS Gold medal, Australia's oldest literary award, will be announced. The shortlisted authors are James Bradley for Clade, Tegan Bennett Daylight for Six Bedrooms, Drusilla Modjeska for Second Half First, and Brenda Niall for Mannix.