The Garret: Writers & the publishing industry

To celebrate the end of 2019, we've re-released our highest rating fiction interviews of the year: #3 is Anna Krien. Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. In 2019 she moved from non-fiction to fiction with her first novel Act of Grace. Anna’s writing has also been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship. About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charlotte Wood is one of Australia's most provocative writers. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant services to literature, and was named one of the Australian Financial Review's 100 Women of Influence.  Charlotte has published six novels and two books of non-fiction. She is best known for The Natural Way of Things, which received the 2016 Stella Prize, the 2016 Indie Book of the Year and Novel of the Year, was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction and was the University of Canberra Book of the Year for 2019. In late 2019 she released The Weekend, which has already been longlisted in the 2019 Indie Book Awards. Her non-fiction works include The Writer’s Room, a collection of interviews with authors about the creative process.   About The Garret The transcript of this interview will be published soon at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Clare Bowditch is a storyteller - a singer, songwriter and memoirist. In 2019 she released her memoir Your Own Kind of Girl. She is also an ARIA Award-winning musician (Best Female Artist), Rolling Stone Woman of the Year (Contribution to Culture), Logie-nominated actor (for her role as 'Rosanna' on hit TV show Offspring), and a former ABC broadcaster. About The Garret The transcript of this interview will be published soon at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a highly awarded Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent. The Hate Race (2015), her memoir of growing up in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s, immediately entered the canon of contemporary Australian literature. The Hate Race received the NSW Premier's Literary Award Multicultural NSW Award 2017 and was shortlisted for an ABIA, an Indie Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and The Stella Prize. This interview is a close study of Maxine’s memoir. Maxine is prolific. Her other works include The Saturday Paper Portraits (2019) and the critically acclaimed short fiction collection Foreign Soil (2015), as well as three picture books - Fashionista (2019), Wide Big World (with Isobel Knowles in 2018) and The Patchwork Bike (with Van T. Rudd in 2016). Her poetry can be found in The Saturday Paper most weeks, and she has published three poetry collections Carrying the World, Gil Scott Heron Is on Parole and Nothing Here Needs Fixing. Maxine’s short fiction, non-fiction and poetry have also been published in numerous publications including Overland, The Age, Meanjin and The Big Issue. About The Garret The transcript of this interview will be published soon at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christos Tsiolkas is one of Australia's most courageous writers. He has published six novels, several of which have been adapted for the screen. Damascus (2019) is his latest work. Christos is best known for Loaded (1995), which became the movie Head On, and The Slap (2008) was turned into an Australian and U.S. television miniseries after it won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Christos is also a playwright, essayist, screen writer and film critic. His other works include Dead Europe (2005), which won the Age Fiction Prize and the Melbourne Best Writing Award, and The Jesus Man (1999). His critical literary study On Patrick White came out in 2018.  About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode, 'Domestic Spaces', was recorded live at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Saturday 26 October 2019. It features Fiona Wright, Megan K. Stack, Archana Pidathala and Fanny J. Poyk in conversation with Astrid Edwards. The domestic, the interior and the personal have traditionally been relegated to the realm of women’s writing, which in recent years has been dismissed as too small to attract significant readership, critical acclaim and writing awards. Our panelists look beyond the censure and speak out in praise of the domestic. Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney, Australia. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction. Her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. Her new essay collection is The World Was Whole. Megan K. Stack has traveled the world to chronicle war and political upheaval. A journalist and author, she was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize for Iraq coverage and her first book, Every Man in This Village Is A Liar, was a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction.  Archana Pidathala is the author of Five Morsels of Love, a cookbook based on her grandmother’s 1974 Telugu cookbook, Vanita Vanṭakālu. In 2017, Five Morsels of Love was shortlisted for the prestigious Art of Eating Prize, which recognizes excellence in food writing.  Fanny J. Poyk was born in the city of Bima in East Nusa Tenggara and has been writing short stories, novels, biographies, and motivational books and articles since the 1980s. One of her short stories was included in 20 Cerita Pendek Terbaik Kompas, and her book Narkoba Sayonara won Penerbit Erlangga’s writing competition. About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode, 'Back in Time', was recorded live at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Sunday 27 October 2019. It features Richard Fidler in conversation with Astrid Edwards. Richard Fidler is taking his gift for storytelling back in time. He has traipsed through Istanbul uncovering legendary Constantinople with his son, and journeyed to the sites of the beautiful and bloody Icelandic sagas with his friend Kári Gíslason. Now he takes the UWRF stage to talk about his love of history and travel, and the stories where the two meet. Richard Fidler is a writer and radio host. He’s the author of the bestselling books Ghost Empire, a history of the legendary city of Constantinople, and Saga Land, a journey into the sagas of Iceland, co-written with Kári Gíslason. Richard is also the presenter of Conversations on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, Australia’s most popular podcast. Richard and Astrid have since spoken again, and you can listen to their discussion recorded at during Melbourne's lockdown in 2020 here. About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was recorded live at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Friday 25 October 2019. It features Claire G. Coleman, Krissy Kneen, Pitchaya Sudbanthad and Michelle Tanmizi. Speculative fiction has lurked in the shadows of the literary scene for years while realism hogged the limelight. Now, as the natural and political spheres crumble around us, speculative fiction’s dystopian worlds don’t seem so different from our own. In this timely conversation, our panelists ask whether we’re now at the point where all contemporary fiction is in fact speculative fiction. Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral Country is in South Coast Western Australia. Her novel Terra Nullius won a Black&Write! Fellowship and a Norma K Hemming Award, and has been shortlisted for The Stella Prize and an Aurealis Award. The Old Lie is her second novel. Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of the memoir Affection and five novels including Stella Prize shortlisted An Uncertain Grace. She is also the author of Thomas Shapcott Award-winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. She has written and directed documentaries for Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Special Broadcasting Service television.  Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of the novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK). He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits time between Bangkok, Thailand and Brooklyn, USA.  Michelle Tanmizi is Chinese-Indonesian and international. She is an author, leadership coach and trainer, and a motivational speaker. Michelle’s first work was a poetry book, Truth. Late Dawn is her first speculative science fiction novel inspired by the conservation crisis we face today.  About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist.  She writes the Saturday column ‘Turning Pages’ and book features for The Age. She won the inaugural Australian Human Rights Award for journalism. Jane has also published two novels - The White Star (2000) and Little People (2011), as well as Storytime (2019), her reflection on rereading the books of her childhood as an adult. About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. In 2019 she moved from non-fiction to fiction with her first novel Act of Grace. Anna’s writing has also been published in The Monthly, The Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, and 2018 she received a Sidney Myer Fellowship. About The Garret You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alice Bishop is a short story writer. A Constant Hum - about the Black Saturday Fires - is her debut collection. The work was nominated for the 2019 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the origins of the work were commended in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, as well as the inaugural Richell Prize and the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. Her essay 'Coppering' was shortlisted in the 2017 Horne Prize. Alice's other pieces have been published by Meanjin, Overland, Australian Book Review, Seizure, Voiceworks and Lip Magazine. About The Garret You can read the transcript of this interview at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jess Hill is an investigative journalist, and she has been writing about domestic abuse since 2014. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is the culmination of that work and represents a new way of thinking about and acting on domestic abuse in Australia. It is also an example of exceptional research and the power of storytelling in non-fiction. Jess's reporting has received two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards. She is also a former Middle East correspondent and producer for ABC Radio. About The Garret The transcript of this interview will be published soon at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tara June Winch is a Wiradjuri writer based in France. Her first novel, Swallow the Air, was critically acclaimed and saw Tara named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her second book, the collection After the Carnage, was longlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction, shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Christina Stead prize for Fiction and the Queensland Literary Award for a collection. Her third novel, The Yield, was released in 2019 and is simply stunning. Tara's Indigenous dance documentary, Carriberrie, screened at the 71st Cannes Film Festival. Tara was previously mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. About The Garret You can read the transcript of this interview at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just off the plane from Italy, Ali Cobby Eckermann talks candidly about life and love, as she transitions from Kaurna land to begin a tenure as Adjunct Professor with RMIT on the lands of the Kulin Nation. Her first collections of poetry little bit long time and Kami (2010) both quickly sold out their first print runs. Her first verse novel His Father’s Eyes was published in 2011 and her second, Ruby Moonlight, was awarded the inaugural kuril dhagun National Manuscript Editing Award and the 2013 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and Book of the Year Award. In 2017, Ali received the prestigious and international Windham-Campbell prize. To listen to an in-depth discussion of Ruby Moonlight, listen to Ali's interview on The Garret (recorded in 2020). About The Garret You can read the transcript of this interview at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

*Beware, there are spoilers of The Nevernight Chronicles in this interview.* Jay Kristoff is the award-winning author of multiple series, including The Lotus War and The Nevernight Chronicles, as well as The Illuminae Files with Amie Kaufman. In this interview, our host Astrid quizzes Jay on Nevernight, Darkdawn and Godsgrave, the three books that make up The Nevernight Chronicles. You can listen to Jay's previous appearance on The Garret (live at the State Library with Amie Kaufman) here. About The Garret You can read the transcript of this interview at thegarretpodcast.com. You can also follow The Garret on Twitter and Facebook, or follow our host Astrid Edwards on Twitter or Instagram. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.