Events

I’ll begin with a disclaimer. I’ve always experienced considerable tension between my writer-self and my book-promoting self. However you approach the task, when you promote your books you inevitably take residence in the kingdom of niceness, where the drive to …

Screenwriting is a very different practice to any other type of writing, and one that suits my personality. I mean, who wouldn’t want to sit under the palm tree being attended to by half-naked man-gods while typing away one’s fantasies?…

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is ‘based on an incredible true story’. Those words are stamped on the front cover of my novel. What they don’t say is how finding and telling a true story can change the life of the …

Currently I’m between book projects.  I don’t know what I’m going to write next. And it’s weird I’m experiencing again the ‘plateau of boredom’ that I’d described in my memoir about my writing life Not Just a Piece of Cake; …

Lee Kofman is a straight talker. When she told me – over a refreshing beverage in South Melbourne – that she felt I was too hard on myself as a memoirist, my inward response was to bristle. I’d just written …

My memoir, How to Dress a Dummy, began as a Creative Writing Master’s thesis – a feminist critique of the beauty industry. The creative component was a recounting of my experiences working as an international model.

A member of …

The second memoir I wrote was a romantic comedy about how my boyfriend and I finally decided we could live on the same continent. When I had an adequate draft, I sent it to a manuscript assessor. ‘It works’, she …

I think I got more lovers than useful writing advice from the various writers’ groups I tried in my younger years, even though those groups were often composed of intelligent people, and sometimes even acclaimed authors. Partly this must be …

It feels apt to round up the discussion of creative nonfiction that I’ve had here for the last two months by looking in-depth into one creative nonfiction book that in my view exemplifies this genre’s best virtues – its irreverent …

A Canadian novelist once said to me that the difference between a writer and an author is that a writer writes, but an author writes and represents her writing, when it’s done and edited. But when I started out writing, …