Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 06 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
‘Romance novels’ have something of a bad rap. Mills and Boons, Harlequins, steamy romps featuring rippling torsos and swarthy Adonises: they’re too often typecast as guilty pleasures. But there’s roaring trade in this neglected artform. Whether dressed up as ‘literary’ or unabashedly commercial, ‘chicklit’, teen fiction or a pulpy delight, there’s a fine art to convincingly writing about love.
The ABC’s Alan Brough grills writers who’ve made romance their business.
Featuring
Marion Lennox
Marion Lennox is the author of more than 80 romance novels since 1990.
As a teenager Marion Lennox read into the small hours, by torchlight under the bedclothes. Night after night her parents would tug away the covers and tell her she’d never get anywhere in life if she kept reading romance. She almost believed them and went onto a career teaching statistics – but romance kept tugging her back.
Marion wrote her first romance while on family leave.Dare to Love Again was published in 1990 and stands at testament to a family’s ability to survive on spaghetti and toasted cheese sandwiches.
She’s now had 84 romance novels published with the giant publishing empire of Harlequin Mills and Boon. Her books are published in a hundred and twenty six countries and twenty seven languages, and she’s twice won the prestigious US Romance Writing award for Best Traditional Romance.
Lili Wilkinson
Lili Wilkinson is the award-winning author of eighteen books for young people, including The Erasure Initiative and After the Lights Go Out. Lili has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, and is a passionate advocate for YA and the young people who read it, establishing the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. Her latest book is A Hunger of Thorns.
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Stephanie Laurens
Author of more than 42 romance titles, Stephanie Laurens has hit the New York Times bestseller list with her last 23 books.
Stephanie Laurens began writing historical romances as an escape from the dry world of professional science. Her hobby quickly ballooned into a career with the publication of her wildly popular novels about the Cynster family. She currently has 42 novels and 4 novellas published, all of which are continually in print. All of her novels have been translated into other languages and are published around the globe. Her last 23 books have been New York Times bestsellers, many in both hardcover and mass market editions.
From her home outside Melbourne, Australia, where she lives with her husband and two cats, Stephanie continues to pen her signature historical romances set in Regency England. Beyond Seduction, is the sixth book in a group of novels about the members of the exclusive Bastion Club introduced in the novel The Lady Chosen. The last book she released was The Elusive Bride (March 2010) and her next book is The Brazen Bride, due to be released in July 2010.
Alan Brough
Alan Brough was born in New Zealand and is quite a bit older than he'd like to be. Alan has always loved books and, from an early age, wanted to be a writer. Then he and his Dad went to see Star Wars and Alan decided that, actually, he really, really, really, really, really wanted to be an actor.
After having been an actor for a while Alan realised there wasn't that much work for a 6'4" guy with a slightly lopsided face and thick curly hair so he tried his hand at directing, broadcasting, composing, dancing (true!), singing and, in an unexpected turn of events, being a professional music nerd.
Recently, he got around to being a writer.
One day he hopes to have a bio that includes phrases like 'bestselling', 'award-winning' and 'so successful that he recently bought a solid gold toilet' but, until then, he's just happy to look at his copy of Charlie and the War Against the Grannies and think: 'Cool! I wrote a book!'