The National Library Bookshop will be closed for stocktake from Thursday 30 June to Friday 1 July inclusive.
Writing Lives Seminar
Supported by the National Library of Australia, Australian Book Review and the ACT Writers’ Centre
Thursday 16 September 2010
4 pm - 5 pm
$20 (includes bookplate coffee voucher)
bookings: bookings@nla.gov.au
02 6262 1271
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A seminar presented in association with the Seymour Biography Lecture. Join Peter Rose and guest speakers Gideon Haigh, Jacqueline Kent and Shirley Walker for an exploration of Australian life writing.
Peter Rose is the author of a family memoir, Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin, 2001), which won the National Biography Award in 2003. His latest novel is Roddy Parr (Fourth Estate, 2010). He has also published four poetry collections, most recently Rattus Rattus: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2005). Throughout the 1990s he was a publisher at Oxford University Press in Australia. Currently, he is Editor of Australian Book Review.
Gideon Haigh has been writing about sport, business, both and neither for almost thirty years. He left newspapers for freelance journalism in 1995, and has contributed to more than fifty different publications. His twenty-third book, Sphere of Influence: Writings on Cricket’s Discontents, will be published in November 2010. He has edited six others.
Jacqueline Kent is a writer of non-fiction and biography, fiction, general articles and literary journalism. Her working background includes radio interviewing, print journalism, radio and TV scriptwriting, editing books, ghostwriting, teaching editing and creative writing, and arts administration.
Dr Shirley Walker is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of New England, a Past President of ASAL, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and Founding Director of the Centre for Australian Literature and Language Studies at UNE.
She published her own memoir, Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle (UQP) in 2001 and The Ghost at the Wedding (Penguin) in 2009. This is the story of her husband’s family through three generations and two wars. The emphasis is on the way the women in the family, especially her mother-in-law Jessie Walker, lived through and triumphed over the events of this period.
The Ghost at the Wedding shared the Asher Award for the best book by a woman with an anti-war message and won the Nita B. Kibble Literary Award for 2010. It is short listed for the Prime Minister’s Award for Non-fiction.