Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 30 November
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
wheelercentre.com
If we were to tell the story of publishing in Australia and the UK right now, what would it look like? Would the landscape we described be an equitable one? In order to change the world of publishing, we need to change the story being told, which should be easy in an industry of storytelling professionals – right?
Part of The Stories We Tell Ourselves project, this panel discussion features writers, researchers and publishers from Australia and the UK, discussing urgent questions around representation and inclusion in contemporary fiction publishing, and taking an honest look at just how much progress the industry has made.
Host Joy Francis will be joined by Sharon Duggal, author of The Handsworth Times and Should We Fall Behind and Maxine Beneba Clark, author of Foreign Soil and How Decent Folk Behave; Dr Anamik Saha and Dr Radhiah Chowdhury, researchers from the UK and Australia respectively; Valerie Brandes, Publisher at Jacaranda Books; and Robert Watkins, Publishing Director of Ultimo Press.
This event will be captioned.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves is presented with Spread the Word and the Melbourne City of Literature Office and supported by the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season.
Featuring
Valerie Brandes
Valerie Brandes is the Founder of award-winning, inclusive independent publishing house Jacaranda Books, and is one of the Powerlist’s top 100 Most Influential Black Britons for three consecutive years.
Through Jacaranda Books, Valerie has introduced voices from Africa, Asia and the Americas to the UK market, and published award-winners including Bernice McFadden, Irenosen Okojie and Fiston Mwanza Mujila.
In February 2018 she launched the #TwentyIn2020 project to tackle head on the lack of Black British talent being published in the UK through the publication of 20 works by Black British writers in 2020.
Anamik Saha
Dr Anamik Saha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests are in race and the media, with a particular focus on the cultural industries and issues of ‘diversity’.
Dr Saha is the author of Race and the Cultural Industries, published by Polity in 2018. In 2019 he received an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow grant for a project entitled ‘Rethinking Diversity in Publishing’, which led to a report of the same name published by Goldsmiths Press in June 2020. His research has featured across a range of media, including BBC Radio, The Guardian, TES and The New Statesman. He was included in the The Bookseller’s 2020 list of most influential people in the book trade. His latest book Race, Culture, Media, was published by Sage in 2021.
Radhiah Chowdhury
Dr Radhiah Chowdhury is a Muslim Bangladeshi-Australian author, editor and advocate living on unceded Bidjigal Land in Sydney's West. She has worked as an editor with Scholastic Australia, Allen & Unwin and Giramondo, and is currently a commissioning editor and senior audiobook producer at PRH Australia.
Radhiah was the Australian Publishers Association 2019-2020 Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellow, awarded for her research project, 'It’s Hard to Be What You Can’t See: Diversity Within Australian Publishing'. Radhiah is also one of the founders and moderators of the Australian First Nations and People of Colour in Publishing Network, a peer support and professional development network for First Nations and POC publishing professionals in Australia. Her picture book Jumble was published by Scholastic Press in December 2019, and The Katha Chest was published by Allen & Unwin in April 2021.
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books for adults and children. Her forthcoming poetry collection is It's The Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people. She is currently Poet in Residence at Melbourne University.
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Robert Watkins
Publishing Director of Ultimo Press, Robert Watkins, has over 20 years experience in the Australian book industry having worked in book retail, sales, marketing, publicity, publishing and more recently as Head of Literary at Hachette Australia.
Robert's love for a good story well told has led to publishing some of Australia's most acclaimed contemporary authors, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Claire G. Coleman, Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Sarah Schmidt and Peter Polites, to name just a few.
Sharon Duggal
Sharon Duggal writes novels and short stories. Her second novel, Should We Fall Behind, was published in the UK in late 2020 by independent press, Bluemoose Books and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's 2021 Encore Award, selected for Between the Covers, BBC television's flagship book show and chosen as a Prima Magazine Book of the Year.
Sharon's debut, The Handsworth Times, was The Morning Star's Fiction Book of the Year 2016 and selected as the Brighton City Reads in 2017. Her short fiction appears in anthologies including The Book of Birmingham and Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks.
Sharon has an MPhil in Creative Writing from University of Sussex and is one half of Brighton-based Radio Reverb's long-running The Ruben & Sharon Show - the UK's only regular radio show with a mum and son presenter team.
Joy Francis
Joy Francis is Executive Director at Words of Colour Productions, a Creative Development Agency for writers, artists, creatives and entrepreneurs of colour and collaborates with organisations and institutions who are ready to actively commit to systemic transformation programmes that inspire and facilitate inclusion and action. Her diverse career covers journalism, policy development, academia, literature, digital enterprise, curation, production, film, PR and creative entrepreneurship, both here and abroad.
Joy is also co-founder and lead of Digital Women UK which facilitates female creatives, emerging and established entrepreneurs and women in tech to fully engage with digital entrepreneurship, run in partnership with entrepreneurship academic Dr Angela Martinez Dy and Loughborough University London.
She worked with the Media Diversity Institute to create the world’s first Diversity and the Media MA at the University of Westminster and was the inaugural project manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships.
Joy is an Eastside Community Heritage’s ‘Woman of Colour Trailblazer’ 2019, and she was selected for the UK’s first Museum of Colour’s People of Letters Digital Gallery 2019 as a literature influencer, alongside literary legends such as Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Busby.