I’ll be in Brisbane next week for the launch of Reading the Landscape. Hope to see some familiar faces there! Tickets are available via Eventbrite. Details of the event:
2018 is a landmark year for the University of Queensland Press (UQP) as we celebrate our 70th year as a fiercely independent writer’s press.
To recognise UQP’s cultural contribution across seven decades of great Australian storytelling, we invite you to join us at the launch of our newly commissioned anthology, Reading the Landscape: A Celebration of Australian Writing.
Hosted by literary editor of The Australian Stephen Romei, the launch will feature a panel of three UQP authors – Matthew Condon, Julie Koh, and Melissa Lucashenko – discussing their anthology contributions and what it means to be a storyteller in the 21st century.
Tickets cost $10 and include a light lunch.
Reading the Landscape offers a unique narrative journey through fiction, non-fiction, and poetry as twenty-five UQP authors past and present consider notions of legacy, heritage, vision and hope. Participating authors include: Ali Alizadeh, Venero Armanno, Larissa Behrendt, Lily Brett, Gabrielle Carey, Peter Carey, Matthew Condon, David Brooks, Karen Foxlee, Kári Gíslason, Rodney Hall, Steven Herrick, Sarah Holland-Batt, Nicholas Jose, Mireille Juchau, Julie Koh, Melissa Lucashenko, Patti Miller, David Malouf, James Moloney, Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven. The introduction has been written by literary critic, academic and author, Bernadette Brennan.
Matthew Condon is a prize-winning Australian novelist and journalist. He is currently on staff with the Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine. He began his journalism career with the Gold Coast Bulletin in 1982 and subsequently worked for leading newspapers and journals including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Sunday Age. His recent books include Little Fish Are Sweet, All Fall Down, and Jacks and Jokers. His next book will be released by UQP in November 2018.
Julie Koh is the author of Capital Misfits and Portable Curiosities. The latter was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards, the UTS Glenda Adams Award in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Science Fiction Foundation’s Norma K Hemming Award (Long Work). Julie was named a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her short stories have appeared in the Best Australian Stories in 2014 to 2017, and Best Australian Comedy Writing. She is the editor of BooksActually’s Gold Standard and a founding member of Kanganoulipo.
Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. She has been publishing books with UQP since 1997, with her first novel, Steam Pigs, winning the Dobbie Literary Award and shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hard Yards(1999) was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Mullumbimby (2013) won the Queensland Literary Award and was longlisted for the Stella Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Kibble Literary Award. She has also written two novels for teenagers, Killing Darcy (UQP, 1998) and Too Flash (IAD Press, 2002). In 2013 Melissa won the inaugural long-form Walkley Award for her Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Sinking Below Sight: Down and Out in Brisbane and Logan’. Her new book, Too Much Lip, will be released by UQP in August.