-
Conversations with Marianna Shek
Marianna Shek was one of the writers I approached when I decided to profile writers on (or should the preposition be ‘in’? Do you appear in or on…) this blog because I really wanted to continue the conversation that we started in Melbourne. I was immediately drawn to Marianna’s creative passion and energy. When you read this profile, you’ll find out just how multi-talented Marianna is. We could have easily ended up with a novella-length interview if we’d allowed ourselves, but we decided to leave that for another day. Marianna has no immediate plans to travel to Perth, nor I to Brisbane, so we will have to make do with Skype…
-
Melbourne
I went to Melbourne for the Deborah Cass award night and to catch up with friends. The Deborah Cass award is open to anyone who was born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas —so that’s a large chunk of the population who qualify for entry. Karina Ko was the winner of this year’s prize, I was runner-up and Su-May Tan was second runner-up. The judges couldn’t make it but the winner and runner-up of the inaugural prize Moreno Giovonnoni and Melanie Cheng were there. Melanie was very generous and shared her experiences as an emerging/emerged writer. She’s also a super nice person and gave Marianna (one of the shortlisted…
-
Deborah Cass Prize Shortlist
“Hate is not only a political strategy, it is a failure of imagination, a lack of empathy. We can’t legislate for imagination, we can only do what people have always done: tell new stories, build better worlds in the theatre of the mind.” — Dan Cass I am on the shortlist for the 2018 Deborah Cass award. Deborah was an academic at the London School of Economics who decided to focus on creative writing after a cancer diagnosis. She had two short stories published before she passed away in 2013 at the age of 53. Her family and friends set up the Deborah Cass Prize for early career writers from a…
