Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 15 March
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
For the first event in our fiction series, we’re pairing two authors with new books out for younger readers: Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Alison Evans.
You Must Be Layla is Abdel-Magied’s second book, and first foray into fiction, about a young girl from an Islamic family and her struggle to fit in at a new school. Highway Bodies is Alison Evans’s second YA novel. It features queer and gender non-conforming teens who struggle to survive a zombie apocalypse.
Both writers believe issues of representation are crucially important in writing for, and about, young people. For this midday session in March, they’ll talk schoolyard angst, weird science and writing real Australian teen characters for real Australian young readers.
Readings will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese-born Australian mechanical engineer, writer and social advocate.
Yassmin worked on oil and gas rigs around Australia for almost half a decade before becoming a full-time writer and broadcaster. She published her debut memoir, Yassmin's Story, at age 24, then became the presenter of Australia Wide, a national weekly current-affairs show on the ABC and Motor Mouth, a podcast on becoming an F1 driver. After hosting the documentary, The Truth About Racism, she created Hijabistas for the ABC, a series looking at the modest fashion scene in Australia. Her writing has appeared in publications like Teen Vogue, London's Evening Standard, the Guardian and numerous anthologies.
With over a decade’s experience in non-profit governance, Yassmin founded her first organisation, Youth Without Borders, at the age of 16. She has since served on numerous board and councils, including the Council of Australian-Arab Relations and ChildFund, and also serves as the Gender Ambassador for the Inter-American Development Bank.
Yassmin has been awarded numerous awards nationally and internationally for her advocacy, including the 2018 Young Voltaire Award for Free Speech and Queensland Young Australian of the Year in 2015. In 2017, Yassmin created Mumtaza, dedicated to the empowerment of women of colour, and most recently founded Kuwa, a platform tackling cultural change around sexual harassment in workplaces.
Yassmin has delivered keynotes in over 20 countries on unconscious bias and leadership. Her TED talk, What Does My Headscarf Mean to You?, has been viewed over two million times and was chosen as one of TED’s top ten ideas of 2015. Yassmin is currently based in London.
Alison Evans
Alison Evans is the award-winning author of three young adult (YA) novels: Euphoria Kids (2020), Highway Bodies (2019) and Ida (2017). They are a contributor in the YA anthologies Kindred: 12 Queer #loveozya Stories (2019) and Hometown Haunts: A Horror #loveozya Anthology (2021). They run a fortnightly writing group for trans youth with Nevo Zisin, and they co-edit the zine Concrete Queers with Katherine Back, which has published over sixty queer and/or questioning artists. They are a passionate advocate for the #loveozya community and work as a children's specialist bookseller.
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Leanne Hall
Leanne Hall is an award-winning author of young adult and children's fiction. Her most recent YA novel, The Gaps, won the young adult category of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Leanne is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT.
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