Events

I am the kind of a writer who writes for sentences. It’s not because narrative isn’t important to me, but rather because I believe the shape and texture of sentences affect our narratives. The structure, rhythm and details of each …

During the writing of my new tragicomic novel, Never Look Desperate, I took the first draft of my completed manuscript away for a dirty weekend. To love it again and rediscover the connection. We stayed in a hotel with …

I began thinking about my fourth novel, Resistance – a novel about the craziness and steadfastness of family life – when I was undertaking a Masters in Family Therapy. Early in our training, we, the students, watched from behind a …

My latest book, When Ghosts Call Us Home, is a novel about being haunted by memory and possessed by art. It’s also about complicated families and an unravelling bond between two sisters. I used there literary devices – embedded …

For about two years, at the peak of my pursuit of publication, I received approximately 10 rejection emails daily from both Australian and international journals.

Months of relentless submissions had thickened my skin, making it tougher than a rhino’s and …

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 …