Award-winning author Amanda Lohrey (The Conversion) sits down with poet and editor Michelle Cahill to talk about hope and trust in literature.

Michelle is a poet and novelist of Indian heritage. She is the 2023 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence. Her short story collection Letter to Pessoa was awarded the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. Her novel Daisy & Woolf was longlisted in the ALS Gold Medal and the Voss Literary Prize. She has been shortlisted in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and received the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize. Cahill is the artistic director of Mascara. 

Amanda lives in Tasmania and writes fiction. In November 2012 she received the 2012 Patrick White Award for literature. Her 2020 novel The Labyrinth won the 2021 Miles Franklin Award, the Voss Award for fiction, the Prime Minister’s Award for fiction and the Tasmanian Literary Award for fiction. Her most recent publication is a novel, The Conversion (2023). In 2022, Melbourne University Press published a critical study of her work, Lohrey, by Dr Julieanne Lamond of the Australian National University.

Free, but bookings are essential.