Live-stream: Arnold Zable

This event will be live-streamed on this page. 

Arnold Zable is a much-loved Australian writer and a life-long traveller. He’s well known for his affectionate accounts of the characters and suburbs of his hometown, Melbourne (in Cafe Scheherazade and The Fighter) as well as his portraits of people and places he's encountered all across the world, in his incredibly far-reaching travels (Violin Lessons).

As a writer and a human rights advocate, Zable has written across a number of forms – including fiction, travelogue and biography – but all his work is consumed with questions of memory and displacement. His writing is gentle, wise and always deeply humane.

His new work, The Watermill, brings together many of these threads. It's a quartet of stories from his life and travels, carrying the reader from the remote provinces of China to Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iran and present-day Melbourne. In the book, he explores how the tides of history affect the lives and destinies of individuals.

In this live-streamed conversation hosted by Sami Shah, Zable will discuss a subject that’s woven through all his writing: the dignity and decency of ordinary people. 

Presented in partnership with Montalto. This event was originally scheduled to take place at Montalto. It will now be held online-only due to precautions and restrictions relating to coronavirus.