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Paula Saunders: The Distance Home

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Event Status

This event will now take place at the Wheeler Centre at 6.15pm.

Paula Saunders has described her debut novel, The Distance Home, as a ‘completely American story.’ Especially, she says, because ‘it’s a story of division – of the haves and have-nots, the accepted and rejected.’

The Distance Home is a novel of the Midwest – a tale of ambition, aggression and family faultlines – and it was one of the strongest US debuts of 2018. Praised by the likes of Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham, and positively reviewed in the New York Times, it’s a family epic that explores a pervasive and destructive obsession with success and failure. The book draws on Saunders’s own early life in rural South Dakota and her experiences as a gifted ballet dancer. It tells the story of young sibling dancers in Rapid City in the 1960s and their efforts to move beyond the sometimes corrosive influence of their parents.

Saunders’s novel squares up to the big existential questions – how are we shaped by our parents, our culture and our place in history and geography? – and searches for answers with compassion, sensitivity and insight.

Saunders is a thrilling new literary voice. She’ll join us in May to talk American dreams and American dysfunction.

Readings will be our bookseller at this event.

Featuring

Paula Saunders

Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She danced as an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet in New York City under the direction of David Howard. She is a graduate of Barnard College as well as the Syracuse University creative writing program, where she was a student of Tobias Wolff and... Read more

Michael Williams

Michael Williams joined Sydney Writers’ Festival in September 2020, as the Artistic Director navigating the post-pandemic landscape going into the 2021 festival. He has spent the past decade at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas in Melbourne; as its founding Head of Programming in 200... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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