Remember the world before June 1997? If you can't, don't worry; you didn't miss much. The world was a dull, uninspired, basically pointless place. Nobody had ever heard of quidditch or boggarts or kneazles. Hardly anybody even knew how to pronounce 'Hermione'.

Luckily, J.K. Rowling stepped up and fixed everything. By imagining the incredible world of Hogwarts and writing the…

This event is now fully booked. Festival passes to Clunes Booktown (excluding this event) are available at the festival website.

‘A word after a word after a word is power,’ wrote the feminist author Margaret Atwood.

What is the power of putting a woman front and centre in a story? And is it still a subversive act? In this broad…

Self-publishing success stories don’t come more spectacular than the story of action-thriller writer Matthew Reilly.

In 1996, aged 22, the Sydney-based writer took out a bank loan to self-publish his first novel, Contest, after his manuscript was rejected by all major Australian publishers. A commissioning editor at Pan Macmillan stumbled across a copy of Contest in 1997, and the…

‘My body was still boyish and small and straight up and down, but I knew that it was interesting to men.’ Abigail Ulman’s short-story collection, Hot Little Hands, features female characters on the brink of adulthood, coming to terms with desire and what it means to be desired.

Such frank, funny and authentic depictions of girls’ sexuality (and its…