Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 17 November
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Have you ever felt that The Next Big Thing should’ve been … well, bigger?
Australia’s small publishers are right there with you. Each year, the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award celebrates independently published titles that didn’t receive the attention they deserved. Previously, the award has been given to books such as The Cook by Wayne Macauley, A Wrong Turn in the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson, and Building Cities by Marcus Westbury.
For this upsized instalment of our Next Big Thing series – a part of this year’s Small Press Network Conference, and hosted by Toni Jordan – we’ll point you, dear reader, to books that deserve another look. (Don’t worry – we’ll bring the bar upstairs.)
Featuring writing from Ben Hutchings, Susan McCreery, Christina Kennedy and Briohny Doyle. (Briohny is unable to come along, so publisher Sam Cooney will read on her behalf.)
Featuring
Toni Jordan
Toni Jordan is the author of six novels including the international best-seller Addition, Nine Days, which was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, and Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016), which was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Voss Literary Award. Toni holds a bachelor of science and a PhD in creative arts. Her most recent novel is Dinner with the Schnabels (2022).
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Ben Hutchings
Ben Hutchings is a comic book artist and co-founder of Australia's first cartoonists' studio, Squishface Comic Studio, where he works as a freelance artist. Ben has worked on poetry books and magazines, as well as other projects such as The Invisible War.
Christina Kennedy
Christina Kennedy’s design and cultivation of a classical garden using native plants across her property on Horse Island was selected by the State Library of New South Wales to feature in its Grand Garden Designs exhibition, which surveyed contemporary landscape design across the state.
Susan McCreery
Susan McCreery is a writer from Thirroul in New South Wales. Her microfiction has been published by Spineless Wonders (Writing to the Edge, Flashing the Square and Out of Place), as well as by Seizure and Cuttlefish. Her poetry and short fiction have also appeared in Best Australian Poems 2009, Sleepers Almanac, Going Down Swinging, Hecate, Five Bells and Island, among others.
Sam Cooney
Sam Cooney runs the literary organisation TLB, which houses the independent book publishing press Brow Books and quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow, as well as running a website, writing prizes, events, and more. He is publisher-in-residence at RMIT, teaches sessionally at several universities, and is a freelance writer and literary critic.
In 2017 he took part in the Australia Council’s ‘Future Leaders’ professional development program, and in 2018 he was a member of the Australia Council publishing delegation tour of India, and travelled to the United States and the UK on Australia Council funded research trips about not-for-profit trade publishing, and was invited into the inaugural Foundry658 Accelerator program run by the State Library of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) as part of the Victorian Government’s Creative State strategy.