Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 26 November
6:30 PM - 7:45 PM
Location
Instagram Live
The Small Press Network is dedicated to supporting independent publishers and broadening the diversity of work available in the Australian literary landscape. To celebrate the return of their Book of the Year Award, this installment of The Next Big Thing will feature readings from works shortlisted for this year’s prize. Join us on Instagram Live to hear from readers including Leah Jing McIntosh, Kirsten Krauth, Sreedhevi Iyer, Tanya Vavilova, Shu-Ling Chua, Poppy Nwosu. Let’s raise a glass to the spirit of independent publishers and all of their achievements from the year that was.
To watch this event, you will need to have access to an Instagram account. Instructions posted to our Instagram Story (@wheelercentre) on the day of the event will direct you to each speaker’s personal Instagram page where you can watch as they go live for their reading.
Presented in partnership with the Small Press Network
The online bookseller for this event is Readings
To keep up to date with the Small Press Network and sign up to their mailing list, click here
Featuring
Shu-Ling Chua
Shu-Ling Chua is a Melbourne-based (formerly Canberra-based) essayist, critic and poet, whose work has appeared in Peril magazine, Lindsay, Meanjin, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. Her debut essay collection, Echoes, was published in 2020.
Shu-Ling was shortlisted in the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, highly commended in the 2017 Feminartsy Memoir Prize and selected for the 2015 HARDCOPY manuscript development program. She has completed writing residencies at the Wheeler Centre and KSP Writers’ Centre.
Leah Jing McIntosh
Leah Jing McIntosh is the founding editor of Liminal, an anti-racist literary project based in Naarm. In 2022, she co-edited Against Disappearance, an award-winning collection of essays on memory and the archive ...
Poppy Nwosu
Poppy Nwosu has published multiple young adult fiction books and been shortlisted for many awards, including the Readings YA Book Prize, SPN Book of the Year Award and the Aurealis Awards. Her latest novel was a CBCA Notable ...
Tanya Vavilova
Tanya Vavilova's fiction has won the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund Best Prose and Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize, and has been commended or shortlisted for the Newcastle Short Story Award, Overland’s Fair Australia and Neilma Sidney prizes, and the Seizure Viva La Novella. Her debut collection of short stories, Grub, won the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2019 and has been released in e-book format and print. We are Speaking in Code is her first full-length book.
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 ...
Kirsten Krauth
Kirsten Krauth is a writer and podcaster based in Castlemaine. Her second novel Almost a Mirror, published in 2020, was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize and named by The Guardian in ’The Best 20 Australian Books of 2020’. Her Almost a Mirror podcast series, inspired by the '80s pop and post-punk songs in her book, was released in September 2021, hitting #2 on the Australian Apple Music Podcast charts. A mash up of documentary and fiction, she is collaborating with musicians like Amanda Brown and Adalita on a soundtrack to the podcast.