LIVE STREAM PROGRAM
You will be emailed a link & access code the day before the festival, ready to login on Saturday morning. If you’re not available on the day, the code can be used to watch at your leisure after the festival.
SATURDAY 19 OCTOBER
CHRIS HAMMER
9:30AM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Hammer is a leading Australian crime fiction novelist, author of the internationally bestselling Martin Scarsden series: Scrublands, Silver and Trust.
Chris’s current award-winning series features homicide detectives Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic: Treasure & Dirt/ Opal Country; The Tilt/Dead Man’s Creek; and now The Seven/Cover The Bones.
Scrublands was an instant bestseller upon publication in 2018, topping the Australian fiction charts. It was shortlisted for major writing awards in Australia, the UK and the United States. In the UK it was named the Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Year 2019 and won the prestigious UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The latest stunning thriller from the bestselling author of Scrublands and The Seven.
Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic are back – and Nell is thrown into her most emotionally fraught investigation yet. A controversial entrepreneur is murdered in a remote mountain valley, but this is no ordinary case. Ivan and Nell are soon contending with cowboy lawyers, conmen, bullion thieves and grave robbers. But it's when Nell discovers the victim is a close blood relative that the past begins to take on a looming significance.
What did take place in The Valley all those years ago? What was Nell's mother doing there, and what was her connection to troubled young police officer Simmons Burnside? And why do the police hierarchy insist Ivan and Nell stay with the case despite an obvious conflict of interest?
WILLIAM MCINNES
11:00AM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William McInnes is one of Australia's most popular writers and actors. His books include the bestselling memoirs A Man's Got to Have a Hobby and That'd Be Right. In 2012 his book Worse Things Happen at Sea, co-written with his wife, Sarah Watt, was named the best non-fiction title in the ABIA and Indie Awards. William is also an award-winning actor and best known for his leading roles in Blue Heelers, SeaChange, Total Control and The Newsreader.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Have you ever bunged it on? Behaved like a drongo? Added mayo to a story? Lost your Reg Grundies?
Join bestselling storyteller William McInnes as he offers his own take on our colourful and colloquial way with words. From the simpler times of childhood to today's testing (and unprecedented!) times, or when we're wasting time, enjoying sporting times or hitting the big time, Australians have a turn of phrase for every situation. Our love of plain speaking communicates the essence of the thing to our mates, to those in the know - and to those who should know better. Part memoir, part manifesto, this warm, witty, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny collection will have you thinking about what you say, how you say it and what that really says about us as a nation.
MARKUS ZUSAK
1:00PM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zusak is the author of six books. His first three books, The Underdog, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, and When Dogs Cry, released between 1999 and 2001, were all published internationally.
The Messenger (I Am the Messenger in the United States), published in 2002, won the 2003 CBC Book of the Year Award (Older Readers), the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards: Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature, and was a runner-up for the Printz Award in America.
The Book Thief was published in 2005 and has since been translated into more than 40 languages. The Book Thief was adapted as a film of the same name in 2013. In 2014, Zusak delivered a talk called 'The Failurist' at TEDxSydney at the Sydney Opera House. It focused on his drafting process and journey to success through writing The Book Thief.
A TV series based on The Messenger premiered on ABC in 2023.
ABOUT THE BOOK
There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us. It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things…
What happens when the Zusak’s open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs – Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously-smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm? The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed… not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family.
From one of the world’s great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir; a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty – but also the visceral truth of the natural world – straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever.
DAVID LINDENMAYER
2:30PM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Professor David Lindenmayer AO is a world-leading expert on forest conservation and is ranked among Australia's top 50 scientists.
He has led some of the largest-scale environmental research programs in Australia and is the author of 49 books on forests, science and conservation.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Forest Wars is David Lindenmayer's latest book drawing on 41 years of research and evidence to explain the state of play when it comes to native forest logging. It unashamedly lifts the lid on the destruction of native forests by government, corporations and the logging industry that is making bushfires worse, killing wildlife, and costing taxpayers millions, for the sake of box liners and exported woodchips.
CRIME PANEL
4:00PM TATHRA HALL
CHRIS HAMMER, DINUKA MCKENZIE & HAYLEY SCRIVENOR
Chris Hammer is a leading Australian crime fiction novelist, author of the internationally bestselling Martin Scarsden series: Scrublands, Silver and Trust. Chris’s current award-winning series features homicide detectives Nell Buchanan and Ivan Lucic: Treasure & Dirt/ Opal Country; The Tilt/Dead Man’s Creek; and now The Seven/Cover The Bones. Scrublands was an instant bestseller upon publication in 2018, topping the Australian fiction charts. It was shortlisted for major writing awards in Australia, the UK and the United States. In the UK it was named the Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Year 2019 and won the prestigious UK Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award.
Hi there! I’m Hayley Scrivenor! My debut novel DIRT TOWN is a #1 Australian bestseller. It won several national and international awards, including an ABIA for General Fiction Book of the Year, the ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and a Lambda Literary Award. Multiple translations are in the works, and the book is published in the United Kingdom, and the USA (published as DIRT CREEK in North America, where it was a USA TODAY bestseller). My second novel, GIRL FALLING, is forthcoming in the second half of 2024.
Dinuka McKenzie is an Australian writer and the author of the Detective Kate Miles crime series, The Torrent, Taken and Tipping Point, published in Australia and the UK. She is the winner of the 2020 HarperCollins Australia Banjo Prize. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards, the Bad Sydney Crime Danger Awards, and longlisted for the Richell Prize. Her short fiction appeared in the 2022 Dark Deeds Down Under Crime and Thriller Anthology. Dinuka lives with her family in Southern Sydney on Dharawal country.
SUNDAY 20 OCTOBER
GINA CHICK
9:30AM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gina Chick is a rewilding facilitator, adventurer, writer and speaker. Writing is in Gina Chick's genes. Her grandmother, Charmian Clift, was an author, essayist and Australia's first female columnist in the early 60's. Charmian married George Johnstone (My Brother Jack) and they lived together on Hydra with Leonard Cohen and bohemian expats. Charmian's teenage indiscretion, an illegitimate daughter, was given up for adoption. Gina's mum, Suzanne Chick, who, after finally discovering her mother's identity at 48, wrote her own book, Searching For Charmian, which was shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Award. Gina was one of ten participants of the first series of Alone Australia, made by iTV and screened on SBS in 2023. After 67 days of unforgettable moments of searing vulnerability, Gina was the last person standing, and the second woman to win an Alone solo challenge. Her determination, passion, and love of the natural world endeared her to more than 5.5 million people around Australia. Gina's articles have been published in The Guardian, news.com.au, Mamamia and SBS online.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Gina Chick, the inaugural winner of Alone Australia, tells the story of her extraordinary, indomitable life in one of the most powerful, moving memoirs you will ever read.
From day one of her wildly unconventional childhood, Gina Chick blazed her own trail, which led her to dance through the hidden world of 90’s Sydney nightlife into the arms of a conman. She fled to the wilderness to find healing, began a wondrous love affair with the deepest lessons life – and death – can offer, and found that all the answers are written in the wisdom of the body and the whirling silence of stars.
If you’re ready to get lost in jungles, wander into wolf-dens, sing with storms, rescue orphaned animals, dive to the depths, dance ’til your knees wobble, fall in love, find yourself by losing it all, and most of all be real; this book is for you.
We Are the Stars is a magic carpet ride through the exquisite mystery of the human heart. You’ve never read anything like it.
BRI LEE
11:00AM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bri Lee is the multi-award-winning author of Eggshell Skull, Beauty, and Who Gets to Be Smart. Her journalism, essays, and short stories have been published widely, and she is the creator and editor of News & Reviews.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In her first work of fiction, the formidable Bri Lee takes on art, romance and much more besides. Exploring the alienation of modernity, the frustrations of intimacy, and the friction between art and commerce, The Work is a no holds barred epic from one of our brightest talents.
INGA SIMPSON
1:00PM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Inga Simpson began her career as a professional writer for government before gaining a PhD in creative writing. In 2011, she took part in the Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program and, as a result, Hachette Australia published her first novel, Mr Wigg, in 2013. Nest, Inga's second novel, was published in 2014 and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. Inga's third novel, the acclaimed Where the Trees Were, was published in 2016.
Inga was awarded the final Eric Rolls Prize for her nature writing and has obtained a second PhD, exploring the history of Australian nature writers. Inga's account of her love of Australian nature and life with trees, Understory, was published in 2017. Her first book for children, The Book of Australian Trees, illustrated by Alicia Rogerson, was published in 2021. The Last Woman in the World, her critically acclaimed environmental thriller, was published in 2021 and shortlisted for the 2022 Fiction Indie Book Award. Her bestselling and critically acclaimed 2022 novel Willowman was shortlisted for the BookPeople Adult Fiction Book of the Year 2023 and in 2024 was selected by Australia's leading booksellers in BookPeople's 100 Must-Read Australian Novels.
Inga lives on the New South Wales south coast among trees.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A powerful literary page-turner about two young people in a race against time to reach a monumental solar eclipse, from famed Australian novelist Inga Simpson
Fin grew up by an observatory, learning about telescopes and planets, inspired by the passions of her mother and father, then leaders in their fields of astrophotography and astronomy. Those days are long over. Now Fin, her mother, Dianella, and a band of outliers live deep off the grid, always on amber alert and always ready to run.
In the outside world, things are not good: extinctions and a loss of diversity threaten what's left of the environment. With a new disaster looming, Fin finds herself thrust into an unlikely partnership with a stranger who has appeared in their camp. Terry is one of a new breed of evolved humans, the Incompletes, who are widely distrusted. But the pair will need to work together during a dangerous journey if they are to play their part in a plan to help restore the natural world - and humankind.
The Thinning is both an exquisitely written novel of nature and urgent psychological suspense.
JULIE JANSON
2:30PM TATHRA HAL.L
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie is a Burruberongal woman of the Darug Aboriginal nation NSW. She is a novelist, playwright, and poet. While living in remote Northern Territory in Yolngu communities in her early years as a teacher, Julie wrote plays and made giant puppets, masks and costumes with Yolngu students. Her career as a playwright resulted in ten productions at various theatres such as Sydney St Theatre, Belvoir St Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre and Sydney Opera House Studio. Black Mary and Gunjies was published by Aboriginal Studies Press. Her plays have been produced in Arizona, USA and Makassar, Indonesia.
Her Indigenous crime novel Madukka the River Serpent (UWA Publishing 2022) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023 and the Davitt Award 2023. Benevolence, an Indigenous historical novel published by Magabala in 2020, and later published by Harper Collins in the USA and UK, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2022 and in 2020 was longlisted for the NIB Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize. Compassion (Magabala 2024) is a sequel to Benevolence.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Compassion is the dramatised life story of one of Julie Janson’s ancestors who went on trial for stealing livestock in New South Wales, and it is an exciting and violent story of anti-colonial revenge and roaming adventure. A gripping fictive account of Aboriginal life in the 1800s, Compassion follows the life of Duringah, AKA Nell James, the outlaw daughter of the Darug hero of Benevolence, Muraging.
DYLIN HARDCASTLE
4:00PM TATHRA HALL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dylin Hardcastle is an author, artist and screenwriter. They are the author of three critically acclaimed books. Their first adult novel, Below Deck, was published in ten territories.
Trigger warning: Explores topics of family violence, overt transphobia, homophobia, racism, physical violence, the AIDS pandemic, the Stolen Generations, police brutality and stillbirth.
Dylin is the co-creator, co-writer and co-director of the TV show Cloudy River. In 2018, they were a Provost's Scholar and a research assistant in World Literature at the University of Oxford. Dylin is currently completing their PhD in Creative Writing. Dylin has travelled to Antarctica, South America and Europe for artist residencies, and has exhibited their paintings widely across Australia and the UK.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Two women - one openly queer, the other desperately suppressing her desires - unknowingly reach for each other over three heartbreaking yet euphoric decades before they collide. A Language of Limbs is perfect for fans of Devotion by Hannah Kent, Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave.
A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves. Set against the backdrop of milestones including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see grief and joy live side by side until these characters finally come together.