We've got some exciting news. 

On Monday night we're having a writers festival.

I know, that's so soon! But you know what, you won't have to get dressed up and head outta the house because we're coming to you. 

We totally got inspired by what the team at Isol-Aid were doing with their Instagram music festival and thought it might be fun to try something similar with writers. 
 
We were really missing roaming through bookshops, heading to writers festivals and chatting with friends at our book clubs and favourite cafes and thought, well maybe we could achieve something similar and ask some of Australia's most exciting emerging writers to read from their new books and giving us an update on what they've been reading in isolation. Why not, hey?
 
 
You can tune in from the comfort of your own home on YouTube via your phone, your computer or any Smart TV or Chromecast/Apple TV with the YouTube app.
 
We're asking people to register their interest so we can send a reminder email with the link just before the event goes live so you can drop in (unfortunately, it only gets generated once we start the broadcast). 
 
                                                                                                                                
 

The Writers In Residence

 
Born and raised in Tokyo, Katherine Tamiko Arguile is a Japanese-British-Australian arts journalist and author now based in Adelaide. Her award-winning short stories have been published in anthologies in the UK and in Australia. The Things She Owned is her first novel.
 
Katerina Bryant is a writer based in South Australia. Her work has appeared in Griffith Review, The Guardian, Island Magazine and Kill Your Darlings, amongst others. Her essays have been shortlisted for the 2016 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, 2018 Feminartsy Memoir Prize and 2019 The Lifted Brow and non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Nonfiction. She has also been anthologised in the collection 'Balancing Acts: Women in Sport'.
 
Stephanie Convery is the deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia. She was previously the deputy editor at Overland magazine and a freelance writer and arts worker.

Rebecca Freeborn lives in the Adelaide Hills with a husband, three kids, a cat, a horse, more books than she can fit and an ever-diminishing wine collection. She works as a communications and content editor for the South Australian Government where she screams into the void against passive voice and unnecessary capitalistion. She is the author of three novels, her most recent bring The Girl She Was.

Sophie Hardcastle was born in 1993. She is an author, artist, screenwriter and scholar. In 2018, she was a Provost's Scholar in English Literature at Worcester College, at the University of Oxford, where she wrote Below Deck. In 2017, Sophie was an artist-in-residence with Chimu Adventures in Antarctica. Sophie is the author of the critically acclaimed Running Like China (2015) and Breathing Under Water (2016). She is the co-creator, co-writer and co-director of the online series Cloudy River.

Stefan Hunt is a director and artist. In 2017, he launched a sell-out multimedia arts festival titled 'We're All Going to Die' which aimed to empower audiences to 'fear less and live more' through humour, colour, and death. Stefan's book of the same name is a celebration of life inspired by his journey with debilitating anxiety and the lightbulb moment that started it all.

Wayne Marshall’s story collection Shirl (then Frontier Sport) was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award, and lives in regional Victoria with his partner and two daughters.

Laura Jean McKay’s first book Holiday in Cambodia was shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia She is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. She is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari. Her first novel THE ANIMALS IN THAT COUNTRY was publishing in April. 

Shannon Molloy is an award-winning journalist with more than a decade of experience working for major media outlets spanning print and digital, covering business, entertainment, celebrity and human interest. He is based in Sydney.

Ronnie Scott was born in Newcastle, grew up in Brisbane and lives in Melbourne. In 2007 he founded The Lifted Brow, an independent literary magazine. He is board chair and president of TLB, the nonprofit organisation that publishes The Lifted Brow and Brow Books, and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University. Ronnie is a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow and a writer of essays and criticism. The Adversary is his first novel.

Leah Swann is an award-winning fiction author, journalist and speechwriter. Her debut novel Sheerwater was published by Harper Collins in 2020. 

Tanya Vavilova's essays and short stories have been published in Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, Seizure, the Mascara Literary Review, Slow Canoe and the UTS Writers' Anthology, among other places. Her short story 'Artichoke Hearts' won the Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize in 2018. She was recently awarded the Writers NSW Varuna Fellowship and was a Bundanon Trust Artist-in-Residence in 2019. We are Speaking in Code is her first book.

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney and now calls the Adelaide Hills home. In The Dictionary of Lost Words she combines her talent for historical research with beautiful storytelling. She has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary and found a tale of missing words and the lives of women lived between the lines.

 

Schedule and times

 
                                                                           
 
Tags: 
Geoff Orton's picture

Geoff Orton

Geoff is a teacher, writer and founder of Writers Bloc