Q&As and Interviews posts
Q&A with Alison Evans, author of Ida
I was wor…
Q&A with Matthew Griffin, author of Hide
Mark Rubbo interviews Tim Winton
Mark Rubbo: Some of the pieces that appear in your new memoir, The Boy Behind the Curtain, have appeared in various journals, but some, like the title piece, only appear now for the first time. What prompted you to collect these often very personal pieces in one volume?
Tim Winton: Well they’ve been written ove…
Jayneen Sanders on Body Safety Education in children’s books
I have three daughters so when they were very young I naturally taught them that their body wa…
Q&A with Miles Franklin winner A.S. Patrić
It’s near the end of winter in Melbourne so my wife and daughters were all home on a Monday because of a shared cold. The news came via a phone call near lunchtime and when I hung up and told my family, there was lots of hugging, cheering and dancing around our kitchen. And then, sin…
Emily Bitto interviews Kate Mildenhall
At a low point during the writing of her debut novel, Skylarking, Kate Mildenhall wrote herself a letter in the voice of her main protagonist, a young nineteenth-century woman called Kate Gilbert.
‘I don’t totally believe in that idea of channelling characters,’ Mildenhall tells me, ‘but writing the letter did have the …
Inga Simpson interviews Rajith Savanadasa
Rajith Savanadasa’s debut novel, Ruins, is a vibrant portrait of a family, city and country in the midst of change. It is set in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, around the end of the thirty-year civil war, in 2009. Initially, the conflict is off in the distance, reflecting Savanadasa’s own experience. The war was ‘Something …
Q&A with Readings Children’s Book Prize winner J.C. Jones
When I was growing up, I always loved stories about kids who weren’t afraid to take their destiny into their own hands. Shortly before I wro…
Q&A with Ben Pobjie
Emily Maguire interviews Jane Harper
The Dry opens on a scene of horror in a drought-stricken Victorian town, Kiewarra. Blowflies, ‘spoiled for choice’ and moving from one set of ‘unblinking eyes and sticky wounds’ to another as desperate farmers shoot their starving livestock, feast upon three smaller, smoother bodies: those of local farmer L…