Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 25 March
12:45 PM - 12:45 PM
Catherine Deveny will be explaining ‘Why Becoming an Atheist Made me a Writer (and Why Being a Writer Made me an Atheist)’ at Lunchbox/ Soapbox as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival
Lunchbox/Soapbox is a simple idea; an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day.
At the Wheeler Centre we’re keen to showcase our writers as thinkers and as artists, as people with passions and peccadilloes. So we’ve come up with Lunchbox/Soapbox: a weekly space for them to sound off on a topic of their choice. Think of it as a 20-minute piece of polemic to give lunching CBD folk something to chew on.
The themes will be idiosyncratic: from pop-cultural analysis to high cultural criticism; from political grandstanding to personal mischief-making. But they’ll all be thought-provoking. Bring your lunch along to this bite-sized session.
Featuring
Catherine Deveny
Catherine Deveny has been a comedian, writer and professional speaker for 23 years.
She’s the author of seven books and over 1,000 columns for the Age newspaper, and is an ABC regular. She has appeared on Q&A five times — sitting next to John Elliott, Tony Abbott, Corey Bernardi, Peter Dutton and Archbishop Peter Jensen.
Deveny has performed five one-woman shows in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and has been named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Melbournians. Her charity and activist work includes public schools, public housing, feminism, atheism, asylum seekers, child abuse in the Catholic Church and homelessness.
She’s a keen commuter cycling ambassador and the co-founder of Pushy Women. She is the creator of the enormously successful Gunnas Writing Masterclasss — running 50 classes in less than 18 months.
You’ll find her performing everywhere from debates at Melbourne Town Hall with Julian Burnside to Splendor In the Grass in Byron Bay.
She has never married and lives with her childhood sweetheart in the People's Republic Of Moreland.