Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 03 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
In its 15-year history, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript has launched some big names in Australian writing, including Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project), Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil) and more.
The award is a big leg-up for unpublished authors. Previous winners have gone on to write bestselling books across a range of forms and genres and to win other major Australian literary awards, too.
At the Wheeler Centre in September, we’ll check in with some recent past winners: Jane Harper (2015 winner for The Dry), Melanie Cheng (2016 winner for Australia Day), and Christian White (2017 winner for The Nowhere Child). Hosted by Toni Jordan, the trio will discuss their journeys – from laptop-clutching hopefuls to published debut authors, and beyond.
Hill of Content will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Toni Jordan
Toni Jordan is the author of six novels including the international best-seller Addition, Nine Days, which was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, and Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016), which was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Voss Literary Award. Toni holds a bachelor of science and a PhD in creative arts. Her most recent novel is Dinner with the Schnabels (2022).
View ProfileChristian White
Christian White is an Australian author and screenwriter whose projects include feature film Relic. The Nowhere Child is his first book and one of Australia’s bestselling debut novels ever. An early draft of this novel won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Since publication The Nowhere Child has been shortlisted for major awards including the Australian Book Industry Awards’ General Fiction Book of the Year and Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, and the Indie Book Awards’ Debut Fiction Book of the Year.
Rights to The Nowhere Child have been sold in 16 territories around the world, and were acquired in a major screen deal by Anonymous Content (US) and Carver Films (Australia). Christian’s keenly awaited second book, The Wife and the Widowwill be published in Australia by Affirm Press in October, 2019. Christian lives in Melbourne with his wife, filmmaker Summer DeRoche, and their adopted greyhound, Issy.
Melanie Cheng
Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner from Melbourne. She is the author of Australia Day, which won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, and Room for a Stranger, which was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Her non-fiction has been published in the Guardian, the Age, The Weekend Australian and SBS Online. She is The Saturday Paper's health columnist.
Jane Harper
Jane Harper is the internationally bestselling author of the The Dry, Force of Nature, The Lost Man and The Survivors. Her books are published in forty territories worldwide, and The Dry has been adapted into a major motion picture starring Eric Bana. Jane has won numerous top awards including the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year, the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year, the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, and the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year. Jane worked as a print journalist for thirteen years both in Australia and the UK, and now lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children.
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