Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 12 April
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
What is Australian literature? What was Australian literature? And where is our literary culture taking us? We’ll ask three recent winners of one of the country’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Now in its tenth year, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognises outstanding merit in Australian literature. In this conversation, we’ll explore what constitutes Australian literature in 2018. How do we imagine this country? Do books written by Australian authors reflect the obsessions, the divisions and the evolution of Australian society? Do they challenge us? What are we telling the world about ourselves through our creative culture?
Join Elizabeth Tynan (2017 Australian history winner), Ryan O’Neill (2017 fiction winner) and Cath Crowley (2017 Young Adult winner) for a conversation about books, writing and national character.
Robinsons Bookshop will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Thuy On
Thuy On is an editor, critic and poet who's currently the Reviews Editor and writer for online publication ArtsHub. She has two collections of poetry published by UWAP: Turbulence (2020) and Decadence (2022).
View ProfileCath Crowley
Cath Crowley is a young adult author published in Australia and internationally. Her novels include Take Three Girls (co-written with Fiona Wood and Simmone Howell), Words in Deep Blue, Graffiti Moon, Chasing Charlie Duskin (A Little Wanting Song) and the Gracie Faltrain trilogy.
Awards include the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction (2011, 2017), the Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult Literature (2011), Winner of the Indie Book Awards (2017), YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults List (2013), Cooperative Children’s Book Centre (CCBC) Recommended Book, the Queensland Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction (2017), Honour Book CBCA (2011, 2017), and the Gold Inky Award (2017).
Cath lives in Ballarat, Victoria.
Ryan O'Neill
Ryan O’Neill is the author of The Weight of a Human Heart and Their Brilliant Careers. He was born in Glasgow in 1975 and has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters.
His fiction has appeared in the Best Australian Stories, the Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards and been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Steele Rudd Award and the Age Short-Story Prize. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.
Elizabeth Tynan
Dr Elizabeth Tynan is a science writer and academic at the James Cook University (JCU) Graduate Research School in Queensland, Australia. A former journalist, she completed a PhD on aspects of British nuclear testing in Australia, and is co-author of the book Media and Journalism: New approaches to theory and practice, now in its third edition.
Her book, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story, is published by NewSouth Publishing and won the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Australia Prize.