Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Sunday 01 May
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
St Thomas Aquinas Church, Clunes Booktown Festival
St Thomas Aquinas, 92 Bailey Street, Clunes, Victoria
Get directions
Cate Kennedy explains the construction of her stories in simple terms: ‘I live in a very ordinary place, a farm on a river. I listen to other people and I hear what they're saying.’
Supposedly ordinary spaces, however, can prove extraordinarily interesting upon close examination, as Kennedy’s oeuvre reveals. Take her short stories, for example, where place is vividly rendered in evocative bursts – from housing estates and hospitals to the contested spaces where bush bleeds into outer suburbia. Similarly in The World Beneath, Kennedy’s highly acclaimed novel, considerations of place are central to a story in which the Tasmanian wilderness forces her characters to confront the space between them – and the years that have drawn them apart.
Clunes Booktown Festival’s 2016 focus is ‘Journeys Through Time and Place’ – and what more perfect author than Kennedy to explore how this theme has resurfaced throughout her collected works? In conversation with Michael Williams, Kennedy will offer her thoughts on the deft – and often, powerfully understated – rendering of place in her stories and poems.
Featuring
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.
Michael Williams
Michael Williams is the editor of The Monthly. He was previously the Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne as its ...