Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 23 July
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
What they don’t tell you in birth class is that families are the perfect container for ghosts. Intergenerational secrets? Check. Seething tensions? You bet. Profound attachment, sentimentality and love? Right here, buddy.
Three new Australian novels due out this year examine bloodlines, stubborn histories and family lore in distorted and dream-like ways. In a surreal reimagining of Tasmania, the interlocking riddles of Robbie Arnott’s Flames brim with love and grief, joy and pain. Moreno Giovannoni’s The Fireflies of Autumn threads whispers of migration, war and love – and good and bad fortune – through a series of fable-like tales centred around San Ginese, Tuscany. And in Julia Prendergast’s The Earth Does Not Get Fat, a family grapples with suffering, intimacy and the return of the past.
For this edition of The Next Big Thing, Arnott, Giovannoni, Prendergast and Voiceworks contributor Amie Green will join us at The Moat to share a taste of these exciting new works of fiction.
Readings will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Julia Prendergast
Julia Prendergast's short stories have been longlisted, shortlisted and published with the Lightship Anthology International Short Story Competition, Ink Tears International Short Story Competition, Glimmer Train International Short Story Competition, Séan Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition, TEXT, Review of Australian Fiction, Australian Book Review’s Elizabeth Jolley Prize and Josephine Ulrick Prize.
She has a PhD in Writing and Literature; she is a lecturer in Writing and Literature at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
Julia’s theoretical work focuses the work of the unconscious in narrative composition. Examples have been published by TEXT, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Current Narratives and Testimony Witness Authority: The Politics and Poetics of Experience.
She lives in Melbourne with her circus of a family: Matthew, their six children, two dogs and two cats.
Moreno Giovannoni
Moreno Giovannoni was born in San Ginese but grew up in a house on a hill, on a tobacco farm at Buffalo River in north-east Victoria. He is a freelance translator of long standing. The Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese is his first book.
Robbie Arnott
Robbie Arnott was a 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist and won the Margaret Scott Prize in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. His widely acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and Not the Booker Prize. He lives in Hobart.
Amie Green
Amie Green writes and draws queer, witchy and wormy things. She’s been published in Voiceworks, Concrete Queers, Farrago, Judy’s Punch and Wasteland Online. She currently edits poetry for Voiceworks and is the designer of Antithesis journal. Find her rollerblading around the Western suburbs of Melbourne and on Instagram @amiesgreenart.