A version of this post was first published at Australian Financial Review
During the Adelaide Writers Week scandal – the removal of Randa Abdel-Fattah from its schedule, then an apology and an invitation for 2027 AWW – my predominantly literary …
Events
Writing a Book While Everything Was Falling Apart: A Guest Post by Simon Tedeschi
When I started writing my novel Turin, I believed I understood what the book was about. It began with my grandfather, a Jew from Turin who was forced to leave everything behind after Mussolini’s racial laws. For a long …
Writing as the World Changes: A Guest Post by Andra Putnis
The world we start writing in is never the same one we inhabit years later as we seek to finalise our work and publish. Fast moving global conflicts, political ruptures and the rapid pace of climate change have made this …
Finding the (not-so-fine) line between history and fiction: A Guest Post by Merav Fima
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that it would be interesting to imagine a meeting between the four great female English novelists of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and George Eliot. She …
What Made Me Finally Write a Book: A guest post by Rachelle Unreich
The desire to write about my mother’s Holocaust story had been with me for awhile. Like, thirty-five-years awhile. I had been a published writer from the age of 19, when on a whim I’d sent a humorous piece about my …
Writing in the Dark: A Guest Post by Katherine Kovacic
I spend a lot of time thinking about death. Not in a philosophical sense, but the how, when, what and why of death in every conceivable form. Messy and unblemished, quiet and very loud, tragic and stupid, unremarkable and unbelievably …
Finding the Central Question of Your Story: A Guest Post by Karen Kirsten
I spent nine years grappling with a manuscript I couldn’t complete. Not because I lacked compelling material. My mother and grandparents had survived the Holocaust; there were dramatic stories of love and betrayal, rescues and buried secrets. But I couldn’t …
Using interviews to inform fiction: A Guest Post by Emily Brewin
My most recent novel and my first Young Adult one, A Way Home, is about a sixteen-year-old girl who finds herself homeless in Melbourne’s CBD during a particularly bitter winter. Since we met her, Grace has been living rough …
How to write and publish three books in five years: A Guest Post by Thuy On
First of all, I should add a caveat… the title should actually read: How to write and publish three poetry books in five years. I have no experience writing book-length fiction or non-fiction–nor do I have any inclination to pursue …
Imagining Characters Unlike Me: A Guest Post by Silvia Kwon
For as long as I can remember my fascination with the lives of others surpassed the usual level of curiosity. This need to understand other subjectivities struck me early and, since it was not shared by my friends in quite …