Adulting and Other Catastrophes: finding your identity - or losing it...
6pm Thursday, 17 March 2022
Join Nigel Featherstone (as participating chair), Irma Gold and Lucy Neave to hear about their forthcoming and recent novels, which approach the question of finding your identity—or losing it—in a rapidly-changing twenty-first century landscape.
Nigel, Irma and Lucy have set their fiction in places and times as diverse as Egypt during the First World War, Thailand in the twenty-first century, and upstate New York in the 1970s. The coming-of-age novel has long been an international phenomenon.
They will talk about how their books—whose characters are all twenty-somethings—explore love and friendship between men in the early twentieth century; the plight of elephants used to appeal to tourists; and, relationships between parents and their children.
Nigel Featherstone is an Australian writer who has been published widely. His war novel, Bodies of Men, was published by Hachette Australia in 2019. It was longlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year, shortlisted in the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards, and received a 2019 Canberra Critics Circle Award. Nigel’s new novel, My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, will be published by Ultimo Press (Hardie Grant) in May 2022. His short stories have appeared in the Review of Australian Fiction, Meanjin, and Overland among other journals, and his creative nonfiction has been published by The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Canberra Times, and the Chicago Quarterly Review. He wrote the libretto for The Weight of Light, as commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium; this work was developed by The Street Theatre in Canberra and had its world premiere in 2018. Nigel is currently working on a play with songs, which is also being supported by The Street Theatre. Nigel lives on unceded Ngunnawal / Ngambri / Gundangara Country (otherwise known as the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales).
Irma Gold is an award-winning author and editor. Her debut novel, The Breaking, has received wide critical acclaim and won a Canberra Critics Circle Award. Her short fiction has been widely published in literary journals, including Meanjin, Island, Westerly, Review of Australian Fiction, Award Winning Australian Writing and Going Down Swinging, and her acclaimed collection of short fiction is Two Steps Forward. Irma is also the author of four children’s picture books, most recently Where the Heart Is, which was read by Fergie, Duchess of York, on her Storytime channel. Her fifth picture book, Seree’s Story, will be out with Walker Books in April. As an editor Irma works for a range of publishers, big and small, and was Convener of Editing at the University of Canberra for a decade. Irma is Ambassador for the Save Elephant Foundation, Ambassador for the ACT Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge and co-host of the writing podcast, Secrets from the Green Room.
Lucy Neave is the author of the novels Believe in Me (2021) and Who We Were (shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year, 2013), a Griffith Review prize-winning novella set in a horse hospital in Dubai, and short stories published in Australian and American literary journals. She has spent several years living in the United States: as a Fulbright scholar completing a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing; teaching English in universities; and in 2019 as a visiting scholar in the English Department at New York University. She currently works at the ANU in Canberra where she lives with her family.
Venue
The Book Cow Bookshop
Lava Espresso Bar, Eyre Street Markets
34 Eyre Street
Kingston, ACT 2604