Join Text authors Sebastian Smee and Bernadette Brennan at the St Albans Writers’ Festival this September!

Bernadette Brennan: A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work
Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most admired and controversial writers. Bernadette Brennan was given access to previously unavailable papers and has written the first full-length work on Garner’s whole career to date, interweaving Garner’s life with her work in a fascinating book. Just as Garner crosses genres in her work, so does Brennan with this hybrid literary portrait and literary study.

Sebastian Smee: The Art of Rivalry
The history of art has never been told like this. In his gripping book The Art of Rivalry, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for the Boston Globe, Sebastian Smee takes us into the heart of complex and often tense friendships and rivalries between four pairs of artists who are all household names: Matisse and Picasso, Manet and Degas, Bacon and Freud, and de Kooning and Pollock. In accessible and engrossing narrative, the book examines the artists, their sometimes fraught and difficult relationships, and how they contributed to the breakthroughs in their work. Sebastian will be talking to John Vallance about the creative tensions between these artists.