Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 15 September
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Ender Baskan is a Melbourne-based writer who is working on a travel memoir about his return to Turkey.
Meaghan Bell is working on a series of poems investigating the apocalyptic outcomes of global warming and climate change.
Elin-Maria Evangelista is writing a novel about a handful of Australians travelling to Stockholm for the 1934 world congress in Esperanto.
Rebecca Harkins-Cross is writing a cultural history of Australian cinema, consisting of discrete essays on key films. She is film editor of the Big Issue.
Christa Jonathan’s short-story cycle The Long Way Home will be published as a series of themed zines.
Chad Parkhill’s critical essay ‘About Time’ will analyse Daft Punk’s 2001 album Discovery in terms of technology and temporality.
Kieran Stevenson’s The Johnston Tradition is a novel that follows Padraig Johnston, a young man who has fallen into a life of alcoholic isolation.
The Next Big Thing
Australia consistently produces a wealth of new literary talent – from debut novelists to short-story writers, memoirists to poets. How to keep up? It’s simple.
Once a month, head on down to The Next Big Thing, where you’ll hear from and meet exciting new and emerging authors. These are the literary stars of tomorrow. Come and hear from them today.
Included in our line-up are two special extended editions, with spotlight conversations on selected authors. And two Hot Desk editions, featuring the writers selected for our renowned Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowships.
Featuring
Meaghan Bell
Meaghan has featured at many poetry reading events around Melbourne as well as working with the journals Going Down Swinging and Visible Ink. She was a part of the team producing the Visible Ink journal in 2011 and completed her study at RMIT (Professional Writing and Editing) the following year.
Meaghan’s writing often features narratives which reflect her ongoing obsessions with stories. She draws inspiration from a wide range of influences, from pop culture to ancient myths and legends. Her poem ‘Chandra Tal’ was published in Going Down Swinging Vol. 30 and the short story ‘The Turning Season’ received an honourable mention in a competition run by Swinburne University and Woorilla.
She has written for a Dora Garcia art installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and won the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Prize for 2012 with her poem ‘Pollen––’.
In 2013 she wrote and performed ‘History in the Hearing’ in collaboration with Helen Lucas for Eltham Courthouse.
Meaghan is currently writing a spooky six-part TV series with three other writers as well as working on her Hot Desk Fellowship project called Future Summers. She has a fondness for cheese and likes to collect small things.
Elin-Maria Evangelista
Elin-Maria Evangelista is a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship recipient, 2014. She holds a PhD in creative writing and has published on translation issues when writing in a second language. An award-winning short-story writer, she has been an invited guest at international writers’ festivals and the Emerging Writers Festival.
Chad Parkhill
Chad Parkhill is a Melbourne-based cultural critic who writes about sex, booze, music, history, and books – but not necessarily in that order.
His work has appeared in The Australian, Junkee, Killings (the blog of Kill Your Darlings), The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Overland, and The Quietus, amongst others. He was the festival manager of the 2013 National Young Writers' Festival and the program and production coordinator of the 2014 Emerging Writers' Festival.
Rebecca Harkins-Cross
Rebecca Harkins-Cross is a writer and cultural critic from Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely in journals and periodicals across Australia and the world.
Rebecca is currently a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University's Writing Program in New York City and finalising her PhD in Creative Writing at Monash University. Past roles include theatre critic at The Age, film editor at The Big Issue and long-running film columnist at The Lifted Brow.
Her book The Headless Woman will be out soon via Fireflies Press.
View Profile
Kieran Stevenson
Kieran Stevenson is a Melbourne writer and musician who graduated from one of RMIT’s writing programs and dropped out of another. He has a preoccupation with the unusual, with hopelessness and gallows humour. He is currently undertaking a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre to complete his first novel.
Ender Baskan
Ender Baskan studies professional writing & editing at RMIT. He is the recipient of a 2014/15 Marten Bequest travelling scholarship for prose and a 2014 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship.
When he’s not travelling, he’s writing about it. At the moment, it’s a travel memoir about his return to Turkey.