Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 06 April
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. If you have tickets for this event, we’ll be in touch with you directly via email.
Find out more about our response to the coronavirus situation here.
For this edition of Double Booked Club, we’ll bring together two celebrated Australian authors whose latest books each hold exile, injustice and the meeting of cultures close to their hearts.
Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain evokes goldfields-era Australia, telling the story of two Chinese siblings who arrive in rural Queensland seeking fortune. Instead, they find themselves entangled in suspicion and discrimination. It’s a gripping, heartfelt and richly-rendered book by an acclaimed, versatile author (Riwoe also writes crime novels under the name M.J. Tjia).
The four stories of The Watermill, by widely-beloved storyteller and human rights advocate Arnold Zable, take place around the world – from remote provinces in China and Cambodia to pre- and post-war Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and present-day Melbourne. Zable’s compassionate, sensitive nonfiction unfolds with novelistic lyricism, as he explores the tides of history, memory, healing and belonging.
With host Melanie Cheng, Riwoe and Zable will talk about their respective books, their bodies of work and their habits of writing and reading.
Want to prepare? Ahead of the event, you can read an extract from Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe (courtesy UQP) and an extract from The Watermill by Arnold Zable (courtesy Text Publishing). We'll make these available closer to the event date.
Watch and participate from wherever you are – the event will be live-streamed on this page, and you can sign up for reminders here.
Sun Bookshop will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Mirandi Riwoe
Mirandi Riwoe is the author of the novella The Fish Girl, which won Seizure’s Viva la Novella V and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Queensland Literary Award's UQ Fiction Prize, and Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award – and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Her work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Best Summer Stories. Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies and lives in Brisbane.
Arnold Zable
Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessons, The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, and his most recent work The Watermill. Zable lives in Melbourne.
Melanie Cheng
Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner from Melbourne. She is the author of Australia Day, which won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, and Room for a Stranger, which was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Award. Her non-fiction has been published in the Guardian, the Age, The Weekend Australian and SBS Online. She is The Saturday Paper's health columnist.