Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 06 November
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
The novella occupies a special place in literature – we all know it’s longer than a short story and shorter than a novel. Famous novellas include some of literature’s greats: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Wide Sargasso Sea, Animal Farm. But what is it that defines a novella? What are its strengths as a form? And why are we still writing them?
In an event to mark Griffith REVIEW’s Novella Project II, Cate Kennedy, Megan McGrath, Jane Jervis-Read and Julianne Schultz will kick around these questions.
Featuring
Jane Jervis-Read
Jane Jervis-Read is a fiction writer from Melbourne. Her debut novella, Midnight Blue and Endlessly Tall, won the inaugural Viva La Novella competition and was published by Seizure in 2013.
The novella tells the story of Jessica, a mental health carer whose life becomes inextricably entwined with her new patient, Eloise.
Jane’s award-winning short fiction has been published in Australia’s foremost literary journals including Meanjin, Overland, Eureka Street, Going Down Swinging, Cordite Poetry Review and twice shortlisted for the Age Short Story Competition.
Megan McGrath
Megan McGrath is an award-winning fiction writer from Queensland. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Griffith REVIEW, Meanjin, Seizure, Tincture Journal and One Book Many Brisbanes, among others.
She works for Brisbane Writers Festival and tutors at Queensland Writers Centre. Whale Station is her most recent work.
Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of the highly acclaimed novel The World Beneath, which won the People’s Choice Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2010. She is an award-winning short-story writer whose work has been published widely.
Her first collection, Dark Roots, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is currently a text on the VCE Literature syllabus.
She is also the author of a travel memoir, Sing, and Don’t Cry, and the poetry collections Joyflight, Signs of Other Fires and The Taste of River Water, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2011. Her most recent book is her second collection of stories, Like a House on Fire (Scribe, 2012), which won the Queensland Literary Award and was shortlisted for the inaugural Stella Prize, and is also on the Victorian school syllabus, as a Year 12 English text.
She lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, with her daughter, and is working on a new novel.
Julianne Schultz
Professor Emeritus Julianne Schultz AM FAHA is the Chair of The Conversation. She was the publisher and founding editor of Griffith Review, and is Professor Emeritus of Media and Culture at Griffith's Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, and a member of the board of the Sydney Writers Festival. She is an acclaimed author of several books, including Reviving the Fourth Estate (Cambridge) and Steel City Blues (Penguin), and the librettos to the award-winning operas Black River and Going Into Shadows. In 2009, Julianne became a Member of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and the community, and an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities the following year. She has served on the board of directors of the ABC, Grattan Institute and Copyright Agency, and chaired the Australian Film TV and Radio School, Queensland Design Council and National Cultural Policy Reference Group.
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