Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 28 June
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
In partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival, we’re presenting two writers whose exceptional debut books were published in 2018.
Jamie Marina Lau is a writer and musician. Her first novel, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Readings Residency Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize. It's an innovative work of fiction, about the intersecting online and offline worlds of a young woman who lives with her dad in a claustrophobic Chinatown apartment. The novel has been described by one reviewer as a 'surreal, electronic parable'.
In Sreedhevi Iyer's short story collection, Jungle Without Water, the Melbourne-based writer delves into themes of displacement, prejudice and Australian suburban mores with great wit and originality. (One magic realist story is even told from the perspective of a ‘divine’ coconut.)
Both writers have bright futures ahead. Sreedhevi Iyer’s second novel, The Tiniest House of All Time, will be released in September 2019 with Wild Dingo Press, while Brow Books have recently signed two more novels by Jamie Marina Lau, with the first, Gunk Baby, to be published in 2020.
Ahead of the event you can prepare by reading a short story, 'The Lovely Village', from Jungle Without Water by Sreedhevi Iyer (courtesy Gazebo Books) and an extract from Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau (courtesy Brow Books).
Join the pair for a chat about literary experiments, daring debuts and the path to publication. Hosted by Sumudu Samarawickrama.
Presented in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival.
Readings will be our bookseller for this event.
This event will be live-streamed – sign up for reminders below.
Featuring
Jamie Marina Lau
Jamie Marina Lau is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of Pink Mountain on Locust Island. With explorations focusing on language, Jamie's work meditates on a landscape exploring dis-location of culture and space. Her second novel Gunk Baby will be published in May 2020 with Brow Books.
Sumudu Samarawickrama
Sumudu Samarawickrama is from Werribee. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Overland, Meanjin and the Lifted Brow. She co-produced Sidekicked 2017 Melbourne Fringe Category Award Winner 'Best Words and Ideas'. She was a Witness Performance New Critic in 2018. She wants to use art to powerfully challenge the status quo of the structures that underpin our society. As part of FCAC’s West Writer's Group, she is interested in how anger can be a tool towards community. She is on a journey to decolonise her soul.
Her first chapbook, Utter the Thing, is published by Vagabond Press as part of its deciBels 3 project.
She is currently writing a collection of surrealistic sci-fi, and trying to write a play.
Sreedhevi Iyer
Dr Sreedhevi Iyer, an Indian-Malaysian-Australian author, is a graduate of the first cohort of City University Hong Kong’s unique MFA program in Asian Writing in English. Her fiction work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize ...