Anna Krien and Helen Garner: Night Games

Read our write-up of this event in our Notes. It’s also been blogged about by James Douglas at Meanjin and WH Chong at Crikey’s culture mulcher.
In this very special event, two generations of Australian reportage royalty come together, as the world- renowned Helen Garner interviews Anna Krien, one of the brightest writers of her generation, about her new book, Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport.
Anna Krien was shortlisted for just about every literary prize in the country for her groundbreaking debut about Tasmania’s logging industry, Into the Woods – described by Chloe Hooper as ‘an intimate, urgent book pulsing with truth’.
Night Games is another balanced and fearless work of investigative reportage, as Krien ventures into the murky world of football culture, as it relates to women.
In the tradition of Garner’s The First Stone, this is a closely observed look at sex, consent and power. At its centre is Krien’s account of the rape trial of a footballer.
What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks, or games – involving women. These games sometimes involve consensual sex, but sometimes they don’t … and sometimes they fall into a grey area.
This is the world of Sam Newman, Ricky Nixon, Matty Johns, the Cronulla Sharks. A world where women are there to service men, or to bring them together. A world of prolonged adolescence.
Featuring
Featuring

Anna Krien is the author of the award-winning Night Games and Into the Woods, as well as two Quarterly Essays, Us and Them and The Long Goodbye. Anna’s writing has been published in The Monthly, the Age, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Stories and The Big Issue. In 2014 she won the UK Will... Read more

‘It is astonishing how much shit a woman will cop in the interests of civic and domestic order.’ Helen Garner is a legend. Our poet-laureate of the acute observation, the award-winning novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist has made a peerless contribution to Australian letter... Read more
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