Woodend Winter Arts Festival: 30 years of Victorian Writing
A stellar line up of award winning Victorian writers help to celebrate 30 years of Writers Victoria. Across a range of genres the authors talk about their books and read extracts. A veritable feast! Tickets $20 per person.
Biographies:
Mark Brandi is a Melbourne writer. His bestselling novel, Wimmera, won the Debut Dagger (UK) and the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction and has been shortlisted for numerous prizes. His second novel, The Rip, is out in 2019.
Kelly Gardiner is a writer, editor and educator. Her latest book is 1917: Australia’s Great War, set on the Western Front and in Melbourne during the First World War.
Her previous book, Goddess, is a novel based on the remarkable life of the seventeenth century French swordswoman and opera singer, Julie d’Aubigny.
Her other books include The Sultan’s Eyes and Act of Faith, historical novels for young adults set during the time of the English Civil Wars and the Inquisition. Both books were shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and Act of Faith was also shortlisted for the Gold Inky Award, and Highly Commended in the Barbara Jefferis Award. Both were Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Notable Books.
Eliza Henry-Jones is an author based on a little farm in the Yarra Valley of Victoria. Her debut novel In the Quiet was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted in the Indie Book Awards and ABIA Awards. Her second novel Ache was released in 2017. Her first Young Adult novel P is for Pearl was released in 2018 and has been longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. In 2012, Eliza was a young Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in WA and in 2015 undertook a residential fellowship at Varuna in NSW. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Tyrone Guthrie Fellowship (with thanks to Varuna) as well as a 2018 recipient of an Australia Council Grant to research a new work in the UK.
Robert Gott was born in the small Queensland town of Maryborough in 1957, and lives in Melbourne. He has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He is the author of The Holiday Murders and its sequel, The Port Fairy Murders, and of the William Power series of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, Amongst the Dead, and The Serpent’s Sting.
Angela Savage (chair) is a Melbourne writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. She won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, and the 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Award short story award. Angela holds a PhD in Creative Writing and currently works as Director of Writers Victoria. Her novel, Mother of Pearl, will be published by Transit Lounge in 2019.