FEATURED authors
SHANKARI CHANDRAN
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3pm-4pm @ Apollo Bay Mechanics Hall
‘Crisis & Hope’
Author discussion featuring Shankari Chandran
Shankari Chandran’s novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2023. The award-winning novel is an intergenerational epic confronting Australia's uneasy relationship with multiculturalism and postcolonial trauma.
Shankari Chandran was born in the UK after her parents, both doctors, fled Sri Lanka as the country stood on the precipice of civil war. Three years later the family arrived in Canberra, where Shankari was raised.
Shankari now lives in Sydney with her husband and four children where she explores dispossession and the creation of community through her fiction. She is an Australian Tamil lawyer who has spent two decades working in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery.
Her other novels include Song of the Sun God, which was long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018). Song of the Sun is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran (no relation).
Her next novel will be published by Ultimo Press this year. Her unpublished manuscript, a political thriller called Unfinished Business, has been published as an Audible and is the first in her Ellie Harper thriller series.
Her short stories have been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2) by Affirm Press/Sweatshop and she is the deputy chair of Writing NSW.
ANNA KATE BLAIR
Photograph by Leah Jing McIntosh
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10:30am-12:00pm @ Apollo Bay Mechanics Hall
‘Crisis & Hope’
Author discussion featuring Anna Kate Blair and Rijn Collins
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6:00pm @ Apollo Bay Community Hall
The Blackboard: A ‘stand-up-poetry’ event, before the accouncement of the Short Story Competition Winner (Open Category). Hosted by author Anna Kate Blair.
Anna Kate Blair is a debut novelist from Aotearoa (New Zealand) now living in Naarm (Melbourne).
Anna write’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, most of which explores art, architecture and place. She is also interested in queer desire, grief, and relationships to history.
Her debut novel, The Modern, was published last year by Scribner.
“In an age driven by desire, what happens when you want two different things?
Set in the pristine, precarious world of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), The Modern is a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place. Both playful and profound, inhabiting the gap between what we feel about ourselves and how we behave, Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel is a sparklingly insightful queer exploration of desire, art and her generation’s place in the world. It announces an exceptional new literary voice.” (Simon and Schuster website)
Anna holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge and has previously worked in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has taught a wide range of subjects at universities, museums and other arts institutions in the UK, USA and Australia.
KGSHAK AKEC
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1pm-2:30pm @ Apollo Bay Mechanics Hall
‘Crisis & Hope’
Author discussion featuring Kgshak Akec and Margaret Hickey
Kgshak Akec is a proud South-Sudanese Australian writer, storyteller, performing and community artist, and a lover of words; living, working, and writing on Wadawurrung Country (Geelong).
Kgshak has been described as “a powerful new voice” in Australian fiction. Her debut novel, Hopeless Kingdom was shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the 2021 Vogel Award, and winner of the 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award.
Kgshak was born in Sudan and at the age of three before her parents and four older sisters moved to Cairo, Egypt. In 2003 the family immigrated to Australia where her two brothers were born.
Since the moment Kgshak learned how to write in English at the age of six, she has been writing out the stories that live inside her mind. As a migrant and non-native English speaker, she is fascinated by the unspoken words and unsung songs of the day-to-day, finding herself drawn to stories that challenge perception and go against the grain of the expected while also being grounded in truth. The ones that don't usually get told.
Kgshak grew up in a culture of storytelling, raised by storytellers, song-singers, feet-stompers, and word-chanters, which compels her heart and soul to find stories in the unseen and overseen; and tell them.
MARGARET HICKEY
Photograph by Charlotte Guest
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1:00pm-2:30pm @ Apollo Bay Mechanics Hall
‘Crisis & Hope’
Author discussion featuring Margaret Hickey and Kgshak Akec
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10:00am-12:00pm @ Marrar Woorn Neighbourhood House
Join author Margaret Hickey and indulge your creativity
Margaret Hickey is an award-winning author and playwright from North East Victoria. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and is deeply interested in rural lives and communities.
She is the author of Cutters End, winner of the BAD Sydney Danger Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction in 2022.
‘Margaret Hickey blazed onto the Australian crime writing scene with Cutters End… [She] excels at using the setting to add tension and, here, it is the South Australian coast and limestone caves . . . A fresh setting for a crime novel, and the underwater scenes are suffocatingly horrifying.’ Weekend Australian
‘While the story of small-town loves, rivalries and misdemeanours is well done, it is, as always, Hickey’s observations of rural life that are completely engaging.’ Sunday Age
‘This is the third novel featuring Detective Mark Ariti, and a ripper it is too . . . A fabulous addition to the wealth of Bush Noir novels available, and I recommend it highly.’ Good Reading
Other novels include Stone Town and Broken Bay. Her new novel The Creeper is due to be released in June this year.
RIJN COLLINS
Photograph by Shannon Sexton
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10:30am-12:00pm @ Apollo Bay Mechanics Hall
‘Crisis & Hope’
Author discussion featuring authors Anna Kate Blair and Rijn Collins
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1:00pm-2:00pm @ Apollo Bay Library
Join author Rijn Collins for a discussion of her debut novel, Fed to Red Birds, and the world of book clubs
Rijn Collins is an award-winning Australian writer with a background in linguistics, a future in Iceland, and a passion for stories of the odd and obsessive.
Her debut novel, ‘Fed to Red Birds’ (Simon and Schuster, 2023) revolves around her love of the Icelandic land, language and reverence for storytelling, and the role of the outsider. She’s the author of ‘Voice’ (Somekind Press, 2021), a micro-memoir detailing her exploration of identity through three languages she holds close: Icelandic, Flemish and Irish.
Her first published writing was in punk zines in the nineties, collaborations between members of an international feminist punk collective. Over one hundred of her short stories have been published in anthologies and literary journals, broadcast on Australian and American radio, and performed at literary festivals.
She’s been Artist-in-Residence at a tiny Icelandic fishing village up near the Arctic Circle, an experience which inspired her first novel, and again in a remote forest in Finland, with a studio filled with taxidermy, turpentine and cloudberry wine.
Her writing has won awards as far afield as New Orleans, Melbourne and New York, where her short story, ‘Almost Flamboyant,’ won the inaugural Sarah Lawrence Award for International Audio Fiction. Her memoir entry, ‘Spell for a Skin,’ was selected by judge Helen Garner as the winner of the 2021 Strange Days writing competition.
She’s deeply interested in stories of isolation and its effect on identity and intimacy.
She’s drawn to the cold, the quiet and the quirky.
JORDAN GOULD AND RICHARD PRITCHARD
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10:00am @ Apollo Bay Community Hall
One for the kids! The creators of Wylah The Koori Warrior, authors Jordan Gould and Richard Pritchard, will chat about their award winning series at our Juniors session.
Wylah The Koori Warrior is inspired by First Nations History and is grounded in Culture.
Jordan and Richard are the co-authors and creators of the best-selling ‘Wylah The Koori Warrior’ series. Book One Guardians, Book Two Custodians, and Book Three Protectors (due for release June 2024).
The dynamic duo combine to tell the story of Wylah the Koorie Warrior, hero and friend whose adventures have been 40,000 years in the making.
Wylah The Koorie Warrior is described as a heart-stopping and imaginative adventure, inspired by First Nations history and grounded in Culture.
Jordan Gould is an Indigenous Australian from the Peek Whurrong tribe in Warrnambool, Victoria. He is passionate about teaching and talking to groups about his culture, language and reconciliation. Jordan often performs Welcome to Country ceremonies at corporate and private gatherings.
Richard Pritchard is an Indigenous Pacific Islander of Samoan heritage. He has always dreamed of writing books since he was a teenager. His passion for storytelling and illustration has led him to work on blockbuster movies and animated films such as Happy Feet, The Great Gatsby and Mad Max Fury Road.
