Carmen Maria Machado

Note: Carmen’s book, Her Body and Other Parties, has been shortlisted for the prestigious 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. To attend the ceremony in the UK, Carmen’s Australian visit has been shortened; this discussion will now take place at an early date and time.

Gory, macabre and surreal, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is for readers who like their fiction weird.

Machado’s debut short-story collection – which blends science fiction, horror, erotica and fairytale – is a work of bravura originality. It’s a book about the claimed and contested female body, and about the thrills and dangers of the flesh. With queer women front and centre, Machado’s stories are somehow both brutal and uplifting.

‘It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi,’ Parul Sehgal wrote in the New York Times.

Her Body and Other Parties is Machado’s first book-length work of fiction, and has won her international acclaim, but the Philadelphia-based writer is also an essayist and critic who writes for the New Yorker, Granta, Paris Review, VICE and more.

We’ll talk fiction, fabulism and body language with this trailblazing author in May.

Readings will be our bookseller at this event.