We’re thrilled to roll out the red carpet and welcome cast and crew as we play host to the premiere screening of Addition, a superb Australian production starring Teresa Palmer & Joe Dempsie.

Grace Lisa Vandenburg (Palmer) counts everything because numbers hold her world together. They present certainty, which she likes. Relationships on the other hand present risk and uncertainty, which scare her. When a chance encounter with Seamus leads to something more serious, Grace begins to open her heart, and her meticulously ordered life starts to unravel.

Directed by Marcelle Lunam, and based on the bestselling novel from Toni Jordan, Addition is a wonderfully insightful and engaging film about accepting who you are, quirks and all

In QLF's special pop-up event on 22 January 2026, three of Australia’s most celebrated writers — Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein — will discuss their book The Mushroom Tapes with Hannie Rayson.

The Mushroom Tapes is a true-crime book like no other — a unique study of convicted triple murderer Erin Patterson and our collective obsession with her strange and terrible crime — that's been described as 'a cultural inquisition with psychological heft' and ‘the non-fiction book of the season.’

Why not wash off the sand and sunscreen on 22 January and join these remarkable women for a fascinating conversation about the case that stopped the nation and its sinister and complex themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.

Helen Garner’s acclaimed three volumes of diaries are collected here in one sumptuous book. Spanning two decades—from the publication of her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s, to the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s, and the messiness and pain of a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s—the diaries reveal the life of one of the world’s greatest writers.

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of hard work and resilience, moments of hope and joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

Helen will be in conversation with Jayne Tuttle.

We are delighted to celebrate the launch of Olivia Tolich's hilarious romcom, Side Character Energy. After a series of Mr Wrongs, Bee has finally found her Mr Right. Attractive, mature – William is everything she's been looking for. Gertrude is Bee's best friend since forever (and also her flatmate, workmate and Insta content videographer). When Gertrude realises she's not the main character in her own life, she turns to William's best friend, Arthur. His mission is to find out whether there's more to Gertrude than she thinks, and if so, what it is. The problem is, that might throw up some hard questions-about her life, her choices and above all, her friendship with Bee. Side Character Energy is a sharp, wise, hilarious novel about love-romantic, platonic and toxic – from a brilliant new voice in Australian fiction. Free, but bookings are essential.

In 1963—a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide—the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Naku Dharuk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born.

Naku Dharuk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples.

And it is a masterful, groundbreaking history.

Clare Wright’s Democracy Trilogy began with The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and continued with You Daughters of Freedom. It concludes with this compulsively readable account of a momentous episode in our shared story.

Professor Clare Wright OAM is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster, podcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Clare is currently Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement at La Trobe University. She is the author of five works of history, including the best-selling The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (winner of the 2014 Stella Prize) and You Daughters of Freedom. Her latest book, and the final instalment in her Democracy Trilogy, is the highly acclaimed Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions which won the Australian Political Book of the Year, Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction and NT History Book Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, Age Book of the Year Awards and ABIA Awards, and was longlisted for a Walkley Award and the NIB Literary Award.

Clare will be in conversation with Geordie Williamson. Geordie has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008. He is publisher of the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan, a former editor of Island Magazine and Best Australian Essays, and author of The Burning Library, a collection of essays on neglected figures from Australian literature.

Join Clare and Geordie at the Afterword Cafe.

We are delighted to host the launch of Aurealis Award winning author John Morrissey's latest novel, Bird Deity. David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now he’s ready to go home, a wealthy man. Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom has vanished. Eliza and her baby are alone. As David begins to question the choices he has made, he is visited by a researcher, who wants him to guide her on one last expedition to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau… Bird Deity is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it’s a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny. Free, but bookings are essential.

We are delighted to host the launch of Ingrid Laguna's new book, My Brother Otto.

Quinn's not happy about all the fuss her mum and Alex are making about the new baby. She doesn't want a baby brother. But when Otto is born three months early things change more than anyone could have expected. Quinn meets her little brother in the hospital neonatal intensive care unit surrounded by tubes and beeping machines. And she becomes the best big sister any baby brother could have.

My Brother Otto is a story about family, love and sadness that delves into an experience of heartbreaking loss with sensitivity, warmth and the comfort that memories can hold.

Free, but bookings are essential.

Revered American novelist Percival Everett discusses his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James, a bold and transformative response to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  

In his reimagining of an American classic, Percival Everett flips the script on Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, placing Huck’s enslaved companion Jim – here renamed James – at the centre of the narrative and granting him the voice he’s been long denied. The resulting novel is gripping, funny and strikingly relevant: a sharp reckoning with American identity, the dehumanising legacy of slavery and the enduring absurdity of racial supremacy. 

In this special event, Everett joins host Osman Faruqi to discuss what drew him to this act of literary reclamation and why he views his work as being in conversation with Twain’s. He will also reflect on his decades-spanning literary career and the recent adaptation of his novel Erasure into the Oscar-winning film American Fiction. 

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear from one of the most inventive and incisive voices in contemporary American literature in Everett’s only Melbourne appearance. 

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, stayed overnight in the town, and spent countless hours in fervent conversation about their impressions inside the courtroom – an odyssey that resulted in The Mushroom Tapes.

In league with the co-host of ABC’s Conversations, Richard Fidler, the three renowned writers explore the gap between the certainties of law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.

Satire and subversion with America’s endlessly inventive novelist

Author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning James, Percival Everett joins us for an engrossing conversation about how parody and satire can puncture holes in our ideas about race and identity. Join us for the wit and style of an American literary treasure on his first visit to Australia.

The author of more than thirty books, Percival Everett’s work features strong ideas hitting the current moment. James, which re-tells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the point of few of the enslaved Jim, is darkly funny and boldly eviscerating - a kind of literary restorative justice that provides a deeper understanding of the dynamics influencing American culture and politics. His novel Erasure, adapted into the film American Fiction (which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay) hilariously skewers American publishing and the expectations of the market for works that purport to reveal the “Black American experience”.

His other notable works include I Am Not Sidney Poitier, So Much Blue, Telephone, Dr. No and The Trees, which was also a Booker Prize finalist in 2022. Don’t miss this chance to hear from one of the most vital voices in contemporary literature.

Percival Everett’s conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and a book signing.