Peter Polites and Christos Tsiolkas at the Wheeler Centre

For our last Double Booked Club of the year, Christos Tsiolkas was joined by Peter Polites.

Tsiolkas is the internationally acclaimed author of The Slap, Barracuda and Dead Europe. He's also a celebrated playwright, critic and short-story writer. His new novel, Damascus, is perhaps his most ambitious work yet, based on the gospel and letters of St Paul and concerned with the early days of the Christian church.

Peter Polites is among the most exciting new satirical voices in contemporary Australian literature. Hailing from western Sydney – a hotbed of provocative literary voices in recent years – Polites won praise for his 2017 neo-noir novel, Down the Hume. The book was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. His new novel, The Pillars, is about suburban aspiration and consumerism.

Both Tsiolkas and Polites are writers of Greek descent and both are animated by questions of class, sexuality and community. At this lunchtime session, hosted by Maxine Beneba Clarke, they discuss these themes and their latest work.

Composite, left to right: Melissa Cranenburgh, Lenka Vanderboom, James Cristina and Ilka Tampke

What's small, nerdy, fiercely independent and sometimes noisy? The Small Press Network's Most Underrated Book Award. It's an anticipated annual tradition – always our last Next Big Thing event of the year – and it's the only peer-reviewed and proven preventative medicine for your chronic case of reader's FOMO.

Now in its seventh year, the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award celebrates independently published titles that deserve some extra attention. Previously, the award has gone to The Cook by Wayne Macauley, A Wrong Turn in the Office of Unmade Lists by Jane Rawson. Last year's winner was Living in Hope by the late Frank Byrne.

The 2019 shortlisted titles are Brontide by Sue McPherson (Magabala Books), Antidote to a Curse by James Cristina (Transit Lounge) and Songwoman by Ilka Tampke (Text Publishing), and the 2019 judging panel is Melissa Cranenburgh, Jane Rawson and Jackie Tang. 

In this episode, we hear readings from the shortlisted works, and toast a great year in independent publishing, before revealing the 2019 MUBA winner. We're joined by each of the shortlisted authors (except Sue McPherson, who is represented by Magabala Books director Lenka Vanderboom). Melissa Cranenburgh hosts.

Presented in partnership with Small Press Network.

'I just threw out all ideas of inspiration years ago. It's all just noticing. You've got to walk around the world looking at things and listening and paying attention.'

In the words of one critic 'to read Helen Garner is to discover what might be her defining characteristic: awakeness and aliveness to the thingness of things'. Garner, a national treasure, has now spent almost half a century showing us who we are and how it is. And she has sharpened this singular style — her humour, sense of the absurd and incisive observation – over a lifetime of writing diaries. 

Sarah Krasnostein, left, and Helen Garner — Photo: Hannah Koelmeyer

To coincide with the publication of Yellow Notebook, Diaries Volume I: 1978–1987, Garner shares with us the pages that offer a glimpse into the honing and shaping of a craft. Beginning in the 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip, the book offers a unique insight into how decades of privately shaped internal dialogue creates a voice, and makes a writer.

In conversation with Sarah Krasnostein, Garner discusses the logic of writing, redacting and publishing one's diaries – as well as reflecting on creativity, the emotionally loaded space of hospitals and courtrooms, the architecture of sentences and her fascination with strangers.

Tom and Meg Keneally are an unlikely crack novel-writing team who write about an unlikely crack murder-investigation team.

Tom Keneally is an icon of Australian literature: a Booker Prize-winner, a Miles Franklin-winner, and the author of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schindler’s Ark and other classics. Meg Keneally is a former journalist and PR specialist turned crime writer. The father-daughter pair have now co-written four books in the Monsarrat historical crime-novel series, about a convict and his trusted housekeeper who travel between Australian penal colonies cracking murder cases.

Their latest book, The Ink Stain, sees Monsarrat and Mrs Mulrooney travel to Sydney to investigate a corruption case that might extend all the way to the governor.

How did the Keneally collaboration come about? What are their creative similarities and differences as writers? Hear from this pair of gifted storytellers as they answer these questions, and many more, at Montalto with Elizabeth McCarthy.