Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 3 May
8:15 PM - 9:15 PM
Note: Carmen's book, Her Body and Other Parties, has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. To attend the ceremony in the UK, Carmen's Australian visit has been shortened; this discussion will now take place at an early date and time.
Gory, macabre and surreal, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is for readers who like their fiction weird.
Machado’s debut short-story collection – which blends science fiction, horror, erotica and fairytale – is a work of bravura originality. It’s a book about the claimed and contested female body, and about the thrills and dangers of the flesh. With queer women front and centre, Machado’s stories are somehow both brutal and uplifting.
‘It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi,’ Parul Sehgal wrote in the New York Times.
Her Body and Other Parties is Machado’s first book-length work of fiction, and has won her international acclaim, but the Philadelphia-based writer is also an essayist and critic who writes for the New Yorker, Granta, Paris Review, VICE and more.
We'll talk fiction, fabulism and body language with this trailblazing author in May.
Readings will be our bookseller at this event.
Featuring
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado is a fiction writer, critic, and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Electric Literature, the Paris Review, AGNI, NPR, Gulf Coast, Los Angeles Review of Books, VICE, and elsewhere.
She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Speculative Literature Foundation, the University of Iowa and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.
Angela Meyer
Angela Meyer is an award-winning Australian writer and editor. Her debut novel, A Superior Spectre, was shortlisted for an Aurealis Award, the MUD Literary Prize, an Australian Book Industry Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Writing and a Saltire Literary Society Award (Scotland). She is also the author of a novella, Joan Smokes, which won the inaugural Mslexia Novella Award (UK), and a book of flash fiction, Captives.
Angela's second novel, Moon Sugar, will be released in October 2022. Her work has been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers, including Island, The Big Issue, Best Australian Stories and Kill Your Darlings. She has worked in bookstores, as a book reviewer, in a whisky bar, and as a commissioning editor and publisher. She now works as a freelance editor and consultant. Angela grew up in Northern NSW and lives in Melbourne.