Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 14 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Novelist Alex Miller and historian Jim Davidson mark the first anniversary of the untimely passing of their friend Hazel Rowley. In the space of just four books, Rowley established herself as one of the world’s leading literary biographers. Miller and Davidson discuss her legacy and announce the winner of the inaugural Hazel Rowley Memorial Fellowship, established to further good practice and promote high standards in biography writing. In conversation with Fiona Gruber.
Featuring
Fiona Gruber
Writer and broadcaster Fiona Gruber writes regularly on the arts for the Australian and reviews books, theatre and film for the Times Literary Supplement in the UK.
She also contributes to The Age, Australian Book Review, Opera Now and Art World.
She appears regularly on ABC local radio talking about the arts; she has presented (and currently produces) features for Radio National’s books and arts programs, and a recent documentary on the surveyor and collector, John Helder Wedge.
Between 2003–10, she presented a weekly arts show on PBS-FM. During this time she also founded and hosted Gert’s Sunday Salon in Fitzroy, a raffish club for artists and lovers of the arts – and a breeding ground for new performers and established performers with new work. This won her a Green Room Award in 2005.
She is currently writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Victorian entrepreneur Alice Cornwell: gold miner, owner of the Sunday Times and breeder of Chinese Pug dogs.
Alex Miller
Alex Miller is one of Australia’s best loved writers. He is twice winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s premier literary prize, the first occasion in 1993 for The Ancestor Game, and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country.
Conditions of Faith, his fifth novel, was published in 2000 and won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction in the 2001 NSW Premiers Literary Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin IMPAC International Literature Award, shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award in 2000, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Miles Franklin Award in 2001.
He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, for The Ancestor Game, in 1993.
Miller’s seventh novel, Prochownik’s Dream, was published in 2005.
In 2009, Alex Miller was named as a finalist for the prestigious Melbourne Prize for Literature and his most recent novel, Lovesong, was published in November 2009 to great critical acclaim.
Jim Davidson
Jim Davidson is an historian and biographer.
His best-known books are Lyrebird Rising and the recently-published A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian WK Hancock. Together they have won half a dozen prizes, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize, the Victorian premier’s non-fiction prize and The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year (twice ).