The Garret: Writing & Publishing

Mirandi Riwoe is an award writer of historical non-fiction. In 2023 she released Sunbirds , a historical fiction romance interrogating a bygone era - Java in 1941 before the Japanese invasion of World War II and in the lead up to the revolution to overthrow the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies to become Indonesia in 1949. Her 2020 novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain  won the ARA Historic...

Sara Saleh is an award-winning writer, poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon.  Her poems, short stories, and essays have been widely published nationally in English and Arabic. She is co-editor of the groundbreaking 2019 anthology  Arab, Australian, Other,  and made history as the first poet to win both the Australian Book Review's 2021 Peter Po...

Chris Masters has practiced the dark art of investigative journalism for decades. He spent extended periods with Australian forces in Afghanistan, and in 2023 published Flawed Hero , his account of reporting on Ben Roberts-Smith and subsequent defamation trial. He is the author of Flawed Hero (2023), No Front Line (2017), Uncommon Soldier (2013) and Jonestown (2006). His reports 'The Big League' a...

Leigh Sales is one of Australia’s most recognised and respected journalists. As the new presenter of Australian Story  and the recent host of the ABC’s flagship current affairs program,  7.30 , she has interviewed dozens of prominent people. Leigh is the winner of three Walkley Awards. She has written three long form works - Detainee 002 (2007), Any Ordinary Day ( 2019) and Storytellers (2023), as...

Kate Mildenhall and Robbie Arnott recorded this session 'Into the Wild' LIVE at Canberra Writers Festival in August 2023. Robbie's acclaimed debut,  Flames , won a  Sydney Morning Herald  Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readi...

Kate Mildenhall and Astrid Edwards recorded this session 'The Hummingbird Effect' LIVE at Canberra Writers Festival in August 2023. Kate's debut novel, Skylarking , was longlisted for Debut Fiction in The Indie Book Awards 2017 and the 2017 Voss Literary Award, and her bestselling  The Mother Fault was longlisted for the 2021 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2020 Aurea...

Erin Riley is a social worker, and has spent most of the last decade working alongside marginalised populations in community aged care. Erin is also a writer, and their A Real Piece of Work is their debut memoir and collection of essays. Erin brings a queer lived experience to their professional work and to their writing. They were a Penguin Random House Australia Write It fellow in 2021, and have...

Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland (2002) and All That I Am (2012). Her third major work, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2023) interrogates the historical record to uncover Eileen O'Shaunessy, the wife of George Orwell, and her influence on his writing. Her books have won multiple literary awards: Stasiland received the the Samuel Johnson Prize (the UK's pr...

Briohny Doyle writes extraordinary fiction. Echolalia was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2021, and in 2023 she released Why We Are Here . Briohny is a lecturer in creative writing at The University of Sydney and a former Fulbright scholar, and her writing also appears in The Monthly, The Guardian, Meanjin, The Griffith Review, and The Age. Read the transcript for this intervie...

Beejay Silcox is a writer and literary critic, and also the Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival. Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement , The Guardian and The New York Times .  Read the transcript for this interview here .  About...

Maxine Beneba Clarke  is the author of the short fiction collection  Foreign Soil,  the memoir  The Hate Race  and the poetry collections  Carrying the World  and  How Decent Folk Behave.  Her children's picture books include the CBCA Honour book  The Patchwork Bike  and the illustrated poem  When We Say Black Lives Matter,  which was longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. In 2023 she is Poet in...

Sally Young  is professor of political science at the University of Melbourne.  Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires  (2023) interrogates the history of Australia's media dynasties and the move from newspaper print to radio and TV and the online world. She is the author of six previous books on Australian politics and media, including the award-winning  Paper Emperor...

Kate Larsen is a writer, arts and cultural consultant currently based on Kaurna Yerta in Tamtanya/Adelaide. As one of Australia’s best-known social media poets, her alter ego Katie Keys (aka @tinylittlepoems) wrote and posted a daily poem for over a decade. Her first printed collection, Public. Open. Space , was released in 2023. Kate’s work has been published or commissioned by The Relationship i...

Isabelle Oderberg is a journalist with two decades of experience across Europe, Asia and Australia. Her first book, Hard to Bear , addresses a gap in the market and demonstrates it is possible to write about an experience some dismiss as unpalatable. Isabelle mentions her agent Melanie Ostell, and Melanie has appeared on The Garret before to discuss what a literary agent does . Read the transcript...

Sarah Krasnostein is the multi-award winning author of  The Trauma Cleaner ,  The Believer  and the Quarterly Essay Not Waving, Drowning .  A regular contributor to  The Monthly  and  The Saturday Paper , she was awarded the 2022 Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Her latest work,  On Peter Carey , was released in 2023. Sarah previously appeared on The Garret with Jess Hill discussing writi...

Ghassan Hage and Randa Abdel-Fattah reflect on the publication of ' The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism' - a combined work celebrating the 25th anniversary of Ghassan's ' White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society' and the 20th anniversary of his ' Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society'. Ghassan is internationally renowned...

Omar Sakr is the author of three poetry collections, Non-Essential Work (2023), The Lost Arabs (2019) , These Wild Houses (2017). His first novel,  Son of Sin (2022) was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards. Omar performs 'Iris', a poem from his latest collection, at the 6:30 mark. The Lost Arabs  won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Li...

Overland Literary Journal Issue 249 features several essays, including ' A guide to the colonisation of my mother tongues ' by Natalia Figueroa Barroso and ' Dovetails ' by EJ Clarence. Natalia is an Uruguayan-Australian poet and storyteller and a member of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, with degrees in Communication, Screenwriting and Media Production. Her work has appeared in the collections Racis...

Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light , was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. They have written two poetry collections:  Comfort Food , which was shortlisted for the N...

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills. Her debut novel was the wildly successful The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020), which was based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives. The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023) is her second work of historical fiction, and exists in the same world as The Dictionary of Lost Words. Her first w...

Zoya Patel is the author of  No Country Woman , a memoir of race, religion and feminism, and Once A Stranger , her debut novel. She is co-host of The Guardian 's  Book It In  podcast, and the  Margin Notes  podcast alongside Yen Eriksen.   Zoya is a columnist for the RiotACT, and regular books critic and writer for  The Guardian ,  Canberra Times , SBS Voices, Refinery29 and more. Zoya has won num...

Eloise Grills is an award-winning essayist, comics artist and poet, interested in hybrid visual-textual forms.  big beautiful female theory is her first illustrated memoir-in-essays. In addition to being shortlisted for The Stella Prize, the work was shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards and highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her first poetry collection,  If you’re sexy a...

Adriane Howell is a Melbourne-based writer and arts worker. In 2013, she graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing. She is co-founder of the literary journal  Gargouille .  Hydra (2022) is her debut novel. Read the transcript for this interview here .  About The Garret Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards o...

Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist, podcaster and author. Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (2022) was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, as well as the Walkley Book Award and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Her previous book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (2014), was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing. She is a Senior...

Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman. Her memoir We Come With This Place is shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2023. An educator, she has worked in teaching and learning for many years – a gift given through the hard work of her parents. She continues to experience the privilege of living with country and with family. Debra completed her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics at Deakin University...