Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 13 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
We’ve seen so many werewolves in the last decade that they’re starting to look a little, well, house-trained.
With the recent explosion in popularity of genre fiction, many of the loathsome figures of western mythology and pop culture are losing their scare-factor. Are vampires and zombies still lurking in the shadows of your imagination? Please. You can do so much worse.
Enter Sami Shah, whose fantasy/horror novel, Fire Boy, is set in Karachi, Pakistan, and is riddled with soul-stealing djinns (shape-shifting demon/genies made of smokeless fire) and various other nightmarish creatures from Muslim mythology. Tired of the mainstay preternatural creatures of the western imagination, Sami has chosen to write of the mythical demons that haunted his own childhood. ‘My monsters are not yours,’ he says.
Join Sami and the panel for a broader, spookier discussion of genre fiction from across the world. What creepy spirits lurk under Malaysian, Moroccan and Mexican beds? Do demons and monsters share similar qualities across the world? Or do their powers reflect something of the culture of their origin?
Featuring
Serpil Senelmis
Serpil Senelmis is an Australian broadcaster with Turkish heritage. She is the co-director of Written & Recorded, a content agency.
The West Australian Academy of Performing Arts graduate has worked behind the microphone, in front of the camera and behind the scenes of radio and television programs across Australia. As a producer, she has worked with Jon Faine, Helen Razer, Derryn Hinch, Waleed Aly, singer Clare Bowditch, Jonathan Green, Patricia Karvelas and comedians Nazeem Hussain and Tony Moclair. She’s had a long working relationship with gonzo journalist John Safran and his co-host Father Bob Maguire. Her documentary work has covered the Turkish history at Gallipoli and a retrospective look at 1960s Turkish popular music.
In 2014, Serpil formed part of ABC Local’s broadcast team for the live coverage of ANZAC Day from ANZAC Cove and Lone Pine in Gallipoli. And in 2015, she returned to Turkey for the ABC’s broadcast of the centenary commemorations. In 2016 she presented The Sunday Sesh, which aired nationally on ABC Local Radio and in 2017 she hosted the ABC Local Radio national afternoons program during the summer line-up.
Sami Shah
Sami Shah is a multi-award winning comedian, writer, and journalist. Sami is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism, and is the Ambassador-at-Large for PEN Melbourne.
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Nadia Niaz
Nadia Niaz is a writer and academic who is now mostly from Melbourne, and still a little bit from lots of other places. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies, and teaches poetry and creative writing to everyone from pre-schoolers to postgraduates. Nadia’s own writing has appeared in Strange 4, Text, Mascara Literary Review, Cordite, and Alhamra Literary Review. She is the recipient of a 2016 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship for the completion of her first novel.
Nadia was a co-editor of New Scholar’s ‘Belonging Issue’, a special edition produced as the culmination of the Belonging Project, an interdisciplinary forum for the interrogation of the concept of ‘belonging’ initiated by the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne. Her areas of interest are multilingual creative expression, particularly in poetry, and language use among third culture kids and other globally mobile cohorts.