Upcoming Events
Shakespeare was an avid reader. Some 800 “liberal arts” books (law, history, poetry, drama, rhetoric) were published in England in Shakespeare’s lifetime. We know Shakespeare read at least 200 of them, as well as contributing about 40 himself!
In the bookish comforts of Fullers, enjoy an hour of fine literature as we pull some antique volumes down from the shelves of Shakespeare’s Library. Hear selections from Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the man himself. Dip into the books Prospero packed for his exile, and discover just what Hamlet is perusing when he says he reads “Words, words, words.”
Join Stuart Kells, author of Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature at this very bookish event.
Join Clare Wright in conversation with Caroline Overington about her new book, You Daughers of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World.
For the ten years from 1902, when Australia’s suffrage campaigners won the vote for white women, the world looked to this trailblazing young democracy for inspiration. Clare Wright’s epic new history tells the story of that victory—and of Australia’s role in the subsequent international struggle—through the eyes of five remarkable players: the redoubtable Vida Goldstein, the flamboyant Nellie Martel, indomitable Dora Montefiore, daring Muriel Matters, and artist Dora Meeson Coates, who painted the controversial Australian banner carried in the British suffragettes’ monster marches of 1908 and 1911.
Clare Wright’s Stella Prize-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka retold one of Australia’s foundation stories from a fresh new perspective. With You Daughters of Freedom she brings to life a time when Australian democracy was the envy of the world—and the standard bearer for progress in a shining new century.
The Australian Short Story Festival is an annual festival celebrating short stories in written as well as spoken form. The festival is a not-for-profit organisation set up to bring writers, oral storytellers and audiences together on an annual basis.
Join Jennifer Down and Maria Takolander at this year’s festival.
Join Maria Takolander, author of the confronting collection The Double, in conversation with Christopher Lin.
How do you write about growing up LGBTQIA+ in regional Western Australia? Josie Boland, Damien Palermo and Holden Sheppard discuss different angles of self-expression with Sisonke Msimang.
Helen Lewis was just a child when she found an old suitcase hidden in a cupboard at home. Inside it were the most horrifying photographs she’d ever seen—a record of the atrocities committed at Bergen-Belsen. They belonged to her father, Mike, a British paratrooper and combat cameraman who had filmed the camp’s liberation.
The child of Jewish refugees, Mike had grown up in London’s East End and experienced antisemitism first hand in the England of the 1930s. Those first images of the Nazis’ crimes, shot by Mike Lewis and others like him, shocked the world. In The Dead Still Cry Out, his daughter Helen uses photographs and film stills to reconstruct Mike’s early life and experience of the war, while exploring broader questions too: what it means to belong; how history and memory are shaped—and how anyone can deny the Holocaust in the face of such powerful evidence.
Meet Helen in conversation with MOAD’s Daryl Karp.
Join Jennifer Down (Pulse Points) and Laura Elvery (Trick of the Light) in conversation with Josephine Taylor about their short story collections at the Australian Short Story Festival.
Meet Robert Hillman, author of The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, and hear the story behind his heartbreaking novel.
Jennifer Down and Julia Prendergast discuss writing as women about women with Kelly Fliedner.
Join Maria Takolander (The Double) for the closing address at this year’s Australian Short Story Festival.
