Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 23 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
This event has been cancelled as part of our preventative measures to stem the spread of coronavirus COVID-19. It will be recorded and published online at a later time instead; if you’ve booked tickets, we’ll be in touch via email with updates.
Find out more about our response to COVID-19 here.
Australian icons, landscapes, myths and monsters haunt the works of our March Next Big Thing writers. It’s Australiana, but it’s more bizarre than nostalgic – and more suspicious, too. These Australian writers are looking forward as much as back – skewering our national culture and provoking us to rethink what our fiction might look like in the future.
Sean O’Beirne’s bitingly satirical short-story collection, A Couple of Things Before the End, explores suburban end times and features a Barry Humphries cameo. Wayne Marshall’s daringly experimental collection Shirl has a yowie at a Desperate and Dateless ball. We’re back to Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland for Kirsten Alexander’s gripping thriller, Riptide. And in her Voiceworks essay, ‘Blow-by-Blow’, Clare Millar gets friendly with a furnace in the Yarra Ranges in an effort to master the art of glass-blowing.
Join these four writers at The Moat for readings from their curious, hilarious and hair-raising new work.
Readings will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Stella Charls
Stella is the Wheeler Centre's Programming Coordinator.
An emerging arts manager and event producer, Stella was previously the Marketing and Events Coordinator for Readings, and the Festival Manager for the National Young Writers’ Festival, Australia’s largest gathering of young and innovative writers working in both new and traditional forms.
Drawn to both programming and operations, with a particular interest in education and support for young creatives, she has worked for Teach for Australia, Melbourne Writers Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival and Melbourne Fringe Festival. She really likes festivals.
Stella has a BA in Philosophy, Political Science and Literature and a Diploma of Italian from the University of Melbourne, but has definitely learnt more useful things working on the floor as a both a front of house manager and a bookseller for Readings since 2012.
Sean O'Beirne
Sean O’Beirne is a bookseller and critic. He grew up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, and studied arts, law and acting. A Couple of Things Before the End is his first book.
Wayne Marshall
Wayne Marshall’s stories have appeared in Going Down Swinging, Kill Your Darlings, Island, Review of Australian Fiction, and other places. His story collection Shirl (then Frontier Sport) was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award, and lives in regional Victoria with his partner and two daughters.
Kirsten Alexander
Kirsten Alexander was born in San Francisco, raised in Brisbane, and now lives in Melbourne with her partner and two sons. Half Moon Lake is her first published novel. Her second, Riptides, will be released in February 2020.
Clare Millar
Clare Millar is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and bookseller. She is a poetry editor for Voiceworks and a bookseller at Readings. Her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, the Lifted Brow, Voiceworks, the Age/the Sydney Morning Herald and Books+Publishing.