Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 02 April
12:45 PM - 1:45 PM
While there’s a long tradition of books about life in or around the AFL – and prominent journalists like Caroline Wilson, Sam Lane and Kelli Underwood hold high-profile positions in football culture – there has also been a measurable absence of women in football’s literary canon.
Until recently, that is. In 2013, Nicole Hayes’ novel The Whole of My World looked at the complexity of female football fandom through the lens of fiction; almost simultaneously, Anna Krien’s journalistic examination of sex, power and gender in football was published as Night Games. Since then, Miriam Sved’s Game Day has inhabited the structure and struggle of the AFL, while in The Family Men, Catherine Harris grapples with the intricacies of male kinship that the sport demands.
Coinciding with the very first match of the 2015 Premiership season, Hayes, Sved and Harris will come together for a lunchtime discussion about the role, contributions, challenges and perspectives of women storytellers in the manly world of Aussie rules. Hosted by Triple R Breakfasters co-host (and fellow footy fanatic) Alicia Sometimes.
Featuring
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.
Catherine Harris
Catherine Harris’ short story collection, Like Being A Wife (Random House), was shortlisted for the 2011 Age Fiction Prize, the 2011 Barbara Jefferis award and as a manuscript for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her prose and essays have been published in Australia, Canada, England and the USA.
She won the 2009 Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize and has since been shortlisted for several national and international awards, including the Fish International Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize. Her novel, The Family Men, is published by Black Inc.
Alicia Sometimes
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, multi-media artist and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Age and many more. She is director/co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave—a creative multi-media show about gravitational waves with sell-out shows as part of Melbourne International Arts Festival, World Science Festival Brisbane and featured at New Scientist Live (UK).
Alicia’s TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about combining art with science. In 2021 she completed the Boyd Garret residency (City of Melbourne) and a Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature. In 2023 she has received ANAT’s Synapse Artist Residency and has co-created an art installation for Science Gallery Melbourne’s exhibition, Dark Matters.
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Nicole Hayes
Nicole Hayes is an award winning author and podcaster and a Melbourne-based creative writing facilitator. Her second YA novel, One True Thing, won the Children’s Peace Literature Prize and is a CBCA Notable book. Her most recent YA novel, A Shadow’s Breath, is a CBCA notable book, and shortlisted in the NSW and WA premiers’ literary awards. She is co-author of AFL junior fiction series, Little Legends (with Adrian Beck), and co-edited an anthology of stories about AFL, From the Outer: Footy Like You’ve Never Heard It (with Alicia Sometimes). She teaches writing at Deakin University where she is also undertaking a PhD in YA fiction. Nicole is an ambassador for the Stella in Schools program and the Australia Reads campaign. She is a founding member of the award winning all-female AFL podcast and radio program, The Outer Sanctum.
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