Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 09 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Karen Joy Fowler is best known for her international bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, a sublime comic novel of contemporary manners that Alice Sebold loved so much, she wanted to eat it (strange but true).
Her Booker-longlisted latest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, is a daringly original exploration of family and loss, self and coming-of-age. It’s told through the prism of an unlikely psychology experiment (based on a famous real life one) – a girl raised, for a time, alongside an ape, by her researcher parents.
In the New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver called it ‘a novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get’.
Meet this wise, warm and much-loved writer – and let her be your guide through the invented worlds of her novels, and the ideas within them.
In conversation with Hilary Harper.
Presented in partnership with Brisbane Writers Festival.
Featuring
Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short-story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Her latest novel is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Sister Noon was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize.
Fowler’s short-story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and five grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.
She is the co-founder of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego).
Hilary Harper
Hilary Harper has a degree in English Literature and Cultural Studies, a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing and Editing, and 30 years’ experience in radio. She’s been at the ABC since 2005. She has ...