Events

A year ago, I was a digital poet, freelance arts consultant and self-published writer. I had also been helping make other writers’ dreams come true for more than a decade, as a writing tutor, editor and former Director of Writers …

Reading has been essential to my development as a writer. I don’t just read as a reader, but always, invariably, I also read as a working writer. I’ve taught myself this way of reading through years of writing. Reading is …

Here’s your brief: write one sentence, or one phrase—one word, even—that will define your work, and you. It will be read more widely than any other sentence you’ve written, will be front and centre on your résumé, and feature …

I shouldn’t be writing this. I’ve had three viruses in recent weeks, and each have decimated me. The latest is lingering. Compounded with the chronic fatigue syndrome I’ve lived with since 2017, the effect is physical exhaustion that makes it …

In his book Silence in the Age of Noise, Erling Kagge, a Norwegian polar explorer, describes how, in 1986, he was sailing along the Chilean coast in the South Pacific when, sometime between midnight and 4am, he heard “a …

I’ve been hanging around in the Australian literary world for quite a while – at least since 2015, when my first book came out. In that time, I’ve published two novels and have two more forthcoming with Affirm Press. I’ve …

‘If your hurried heartbeat did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that affinity binds you to stone.’ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

I always begin to write not knowing what I’m doing. …

When I was in my final year of literary studies at university, our professor ran a tutorial on characterisation. Half of the session was dedicated to creating likeable females. ‘Women are motivated by two things,’ he mansplained. ‘Safety and service.’ …

I never set out to write nonfiction. I’m not sure what I write is nonfiction. I don’t know what it is. I don’t really want to know. My first book, Paris or Die, contained the account of a bizarre …

As a young journalist and TV producer starting out in the misogynistic, rough and tumble world of commercial television in the 1980s, I quickly learnt that in order to survive, I had to hide any outward signs of vulnerability. Despite …