Antipodes Bookshop & Gallery invites you to An Evening with Melanie Cheng.

The Burrow tells an unforgettable story about grief and hope. With her characteristic compassion and eye for detail, Melanie Cheng reveals the lives of others—even of a small rabbit.

Established Author Forum: Balancing Writing With Life With Melanie Cheng

Featuring Melanie Cheng, author of The Burrow, on Balancing Writing with Life, examining competing demands on writers’ time and mental energy. Afterwards, join fellow authors to chat in a social setting.

Part creative development, part networking, part writing group, the Established Author Forum features in-depth lectures at a high level from prominent writers on the topics they know best, as well as an opportunity to ask questions about their work and your own. After each lecture, writers share wins, frustrations, opportunities and industry developments within a social setting. 

Why does writing our own stories feel so liberating and meaningful? Join memoirists Nova Weetman, Jo Peck and Alexandra Collier as they examine the pros and cons of writing about personal setbacks, difficulties and joys, and the unforeseen ways in which having their memoirs published has impacted their lives.

How did Australians come to have a political voice? Stella Prize-winning historian, Clare Wright, has spent more than two decades tracing this question through artefacts and archives. The result is a groundbreaking, three-volume masterpiece - The Democracy Trilogy - a milestone in Australian political storytelling. Join Clare and Barrie Cassidy, as they discuss the latest and final volume of the trilogy - Naku Dharuk - the tale of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, founding documents in Australian democracy.

Examined Lives: On Memoir & Meaning

Kate Legge and Helen Elliott, authors of two acclaimed memoirs—one on marriage and infidelity; the other about the people pivotal to her life as a child and young woman—discuss how they have looked backwards, as it were, in those books. And how the experiences they describe in them have fashioned their lives since then.

Moderated by Dorothy Driver.

Award-winning authors Melanie Cheng and Jane Tara share their remarkable new novels The Burrow and Tilda Is Visible and discuss how writing fiction makes space to illuminate more about the human condition than non-fiction stories. With Sarah L'Estrange.

What happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art? Join the magnificent Michelle de Kretser – one of Australia’s most celebrated writers – for a discussion of her new book, Theory and Practice, which bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes.

In conversation with Bernadette Brennan.

Two Writers, Two Readings

Internationally celebrated author and 2003 Nobel Laureate in Literature J.M. Coetzee and novelist and short story writer, Ceridwen Dovey, author of, among other nonfiction books, On J.M. Coetzee: Writers on Writers, will read from their recent works.

Moderated by Nicholas Jose.

Holding up a Mirror: the Drama of the Domestic

Ali Lowe (The School Run), Karen Viggers (Sidelines), Eleanor Elliott Thomas (The Opposite of Success), craft contemporary fiction that demonstrates how the personal is political with social fissures, family pitfalls and collective anxieties all highlighted in the microcosms of sports fields, school yards and the mental load.

Moderated by Suzanne Burdon.

Authors Nina Kenwood, Stuart Rosson and Jane Tara share their stories about receiving manuscript rejections and the pleasure of finally being published and establishing a writing career. These riveting insights will include tips and tricks on how to get your story ideas and manuscripts noticed. With Sarah L’Estrange.