Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 08 September
6:15 PM - 7:45 PM
Mark Mulholland grew up on the Irish border. His first novel is A Mad and Wonderful Thing, about an IRA sniper in love with books, his country, and the beautiful Cora Flannery. Mark will be in conversation with Jo Case.
Miriam Sved is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and footy fan whose first novel, Game Day, explores what sport means for Australians.
Sam Robertson has edited and written fiction for Verge, Monash University’s creative writing anthology, and non-fiction for Voiceworks.
Rebecca Lim is a writer and illustrator based in Melbourne. She’s just published The Astrologer’s Daughter, a paranormal mystery for young adults.
Jenny Valentish has been a music publicist and the editor of Triple J magazine. Her first novel, Cherry Bomb, is a teenage psychodrama set in the Australian music industry.
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
Jenny Valentish
Jenny Valentish’s fourth book, Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, explores the fine line between hedonism and endurance, including the feats of porn stars. It seemed like the natural follow-up to her Walkley-nominated book about addiction and impulsivity, Woman of Substances – in part a mea culpa, but also a heavily researched resource for the public, academics and clinicians alike. As a journalist, she writes for The Guardian, the ABC and The Age, but her time is most preferably spent bodybuilding and kickboxing. As a writing teacher, she also runs the free Facebook community Sundays We Write.
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Jo Case
Jo Case is the Program Manager at Melbourne Writers Festival. Before this, she was the Wheeler Centre’s senior writer/editor. Her first book, Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s is published by Hardie Grant in Australia and the UK.
She has been books editor of The Big Issue, associate editor of Kill Your Darlings, deputy editor of Australian Book Review and editor of Readings Monthly, the newsletter for Readings Books & Music.
Her writing has been published in the Australian, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Monthly, Best Australian Stories, the Sleepers Almanac, Australian Book Review and other publications.
Miriam Sved
Miriam Sved’s fiction has appeared in various places including Meanjin, Overland, Best Australian Stories and the anthology Just Between Us: Australian Writers Tell the Truth about Female Friendship. Her first novel, Game Day (Picador), is set in and around a Victorian AFL club. She teaches creative writing at Melbourne University.
Rebecca Lim
Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator, editor and lawyer. She is the author of over twenty books, including The Astrologer's Daughter (a Kirkus Best Book of 2015 and CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers), Wraith and the internationally bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards and Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Rebecca is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children's authors and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQA+ or living with disability, and is a co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, a groundbreaking anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction. Her most recent novel, Tiger Daughter, was published in February 2021. It is a powerful novel about growing up Asian in Australia.
Sam Robertson
Sam Robertson has edited and written fiction for Verge, Monash University’s creative writing anthology, and non-fiction for Voiceworks.
Having graduated with an arts/commerce degree from Monash, he now works at a qualitative market research agency called The Lab.
Mark Mulholland
Mark Mulholland was born and raised in a town on the Irish border, where he left school at 16. He now lives with his wife, their four children, and a large library of second-hand books in a farmhouse in France. A Mad and Wonderful Thing is his first novel.