Join Melanie Cheng with Mark Smith at Readings Carlton for the launch of her debut book Australia Day.

Australia Day is a collection of stories by debut author Melanie Cheng. The people she writes about are young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Chinese, Lebanese, Christian, Muslim. What they have in common—no matter where they come from—is the desire we all share to feel that we belong. The stories explore universal themes of love, loss, family and identity, while at the same time asking crucial questions about the possibility of human connection in a globalised world.

Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. Of Chinese-Australian heritage, she was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. In 2016 she won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Australia Day is her first book.

Join Jennifer Down on the Byron Writers Festival Road Trip. This year it's heading west to the beautiful northern tableland towns of Casino, Glen Innes and Tenterfield. Byron Writers Festival, StoryBoard program and the colourful StoryBoard bus will be transporting a group of city slicker authors out to talk tall tales with readers in the heartland of Australian bush mythology. Spoken word artist Miles Merrill and novelists Sophie Green and Jennifer Down will leave their lattes to saddle up with jillaroo Road Trip coordinator Zacharey Jane.

While in each town. the posse will be sharing their penmanship with local readers and writers in a series of workshops, discussions and conversations, thrashing out the rival merits of bush poetry vs. rap, rural romance vs. post-punk fiction. The evening events will be off-the-page entertaining, with something for book lovers of all ages.

StoryBoard and Byron Writers Festival Road Trip events are FREE and open to the public, so come in by the fire, take a load off and enjoy the company of some of Australia’s finest writers.

Join Text authors Kate Cole-Adams, Jennifer Down, Tim Flannery, Kate Grenville, Eka Kurniawan, Sebastian Smee, Jock Serong and Nicolas Rothwell at the Byron  Writers Festival this August.

Join Text authors Elizabeth Kostova and Libby Angel at the Bendigo Writers Festival this August.