Cuplet founder Claire Albrecht said Malouf was "one of the biggest poets in Australia and certainly one of the most respected".

"He's most popular and well known as a novelist, but he writes some incredible poetry as well. He's got quite a few books of poetry out," she said.

If you're not acquainted with Malouf, here are a few of his quotes: "What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become".

There's this: "I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives".

And this cracker: "Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on."

This one rings true, too: "Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world."

Malouf will read some poetry from his new book, An Open Book, as well as older work.

Tickets for the event, to be held at The Beaumont Hamilton cafe and bar on Thursday, are - not surprisingly - sold out.

A friend of ours says he's a tad annoyed at his company for sending him "entrapment messages to show us how easy it is to be duped".

The message, which came through the LinkedIn social media platform, was purportedly from his company's chief operations officer.

It said: "Although I've never gotten the chance to work with you directly, I've heard great reviews about your work. Hopefully one of these days I can see you in action!"

Unfortunately, our friend conceded, he was "vain enough to believe the message".

"But I thought, 'he's obviously been tipped off about my personal brilliance and good looks and wants to glom off my reputation by pretending he's my friend on LinkedIn.

"When I hit the 'view profile' link, it tells me I've been trapped by a phishing awareness campaign."

Gotcha!

"But how do I know it's really my company. Is someone asking me to join LinkedIn really asking for 'sensitive information', as described in the phishing message.

"Maybe the link telling me I would have been phished if this was real is really the phish itself, and none of it comes from my company.

"And on and on down the rabbit hole of truth/untruth/real news/fake news."

That last part made our head spin.

I used to be addicted to the hokey pokey, but I turned myself around.