Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 09 March
6:15 PM - 7:45 PM
Biography writing can be a fraught, delicate business – from choosing a worthy subject to ensuring a life is interesting to the reader, a biographer often has to deal with difficult relatives, conflicting stories, and embittered rivals. Their subject may be dead – or worse, infuriatingly alive. And writing memoir and autobiography can have its own set of problems.
What choices does a writer make when faced with drastically differing versions of events? And how does a biographer decide which aspects of a life remain untold?
To celebrate the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship’s fifth anniversary, and to announce the 2016 winner, we’re bringing together four great writers (three of whom are past Fellowship winners) to discuss their work. Janine Burke, a judge of the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, will interview Stephany Steggall, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Caroline Baum as they discuss the art, the attraction and the dangers of writing a life.
Presented in partnership with Writers Victoria and the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
Featuring
Janine Burke
Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, novelist and freelance curator.
Janine Burke is an art historian, biographer, award-winning novelist and curator. She has written a series of biographies on the Heide Circle including Joy Hester (1983), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004). She also edited Dear Sun: The Letters of Sunday Reed and Joy Hester (1995). Her most recent book is Nest: The Art of Birds (2012). Janine is the author of eight novels and winner of the 1986 Victorian Premier's Award for fiction. In 2014, she curated Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing for the Freud Museum London.
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books ...
Stephany Evans Steggall
Stephany Evans Steggall has written biographies of Colin Thiele, Ivan Southall and Bruce Dawe, and she is the author of Status and Sugar, a history of the Australian Society of Authors. She holds a PhD in Australian Literature from the University of Queensland, and in 2013 was awarded the Hazel Rowley Fellowship for her recently-published memoir, Interestingly Enough: The Life of Tom Keneally (Nero, 2015).
Caroline Baum
Caroline Baum is a respected journalist and presenter. She has worked for the BBC, ABC, Time Life Books, Vogue magazine (UK and Australia), was the founding editor of Good Reading magazine and the editorial director of Booktopia.
Caroline has been a judge of the Stella Prize and the Ned Kelly and Kibble Awards. She is in demand as a presenter at writers’ festivals across Australia and has interviewed many of the world's top international authors. Her writing has been published in major national publications and online media.
Caroline is a regular contributor to national media and her writing has appeared in two anthologies: My Mother My Father and Rebellious Daughters. She is the recipient of the Hazel Rowley Fellowship 2015. Caroline lives on the South Coast of NSW.