Events
We hold a wide range of events at Crow Books from meet-the-author to new book launches. See our current events below and sign up to our newsletter to hear about upcoming events.
PAST EVENTS
Fremantle Press presents the Great Big Book Club
Our friends at Fremantle Press and The Literature Centre invite you to celebrate the release of two new titles shortlisted for the 2023 Fogarty Literary Award – Jasper Cliff by Josh Kemp and A Wreck of Seabirds by Karleah Olson.
Hosted at The Literature Centre, the books will be launched by the founder of the Fogarty Foundation, Annie Fogarty, and followed by an in-conversation hosted by 2021 Fogarty Literary Award winner, Brooke Dunnell. We will be there to support and sell copies of these great books!
The event is free to attend, but bookings are essential. Click here to book!
We hope to see you there!
ABOUT JASPER CLIFF
This gothic thriller is set in the tiny outpost of Jasper Cliff in the remote heart of north-west Australia, a place where people have a habit of vanishing. As Lachlan drives north to look for his missing brother Toby, he too is drawn into the foreboding, timeless landscape of the East Pilbara – to a place called The Rift, where the truth of Toby’s disappearance may be revealed. This gothic thriller reveals the scars of a colonial legacy in a landscape where survival is a formidable challenge, and the line between life and death becomes desperately thin.
ABOUT JOSH KEMP
Josh Kemp is an author of Australian gothic and crime fiction. He lives in the south-west of Western Australia but finds himself drawn, over and over again, to the red dirt of the state’s north. His debut novel, Banjawarn, won the 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award, the 2022 Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Best Emerging Writer.
ABOUT A WRECK OF SEABIRDS
This confronting and compelling read delves into themes of loss, isolation and entrapment, and is set against the brooding backdrop of the Australian coast. The narrative moves back and forth in time, following the interwoven storylines of three protagonists – Briony, Ren and Sarah.
Grappling with grief and loss, Briony and Ren are brought together in their hometown, where Ren has returned to care for his dying father and Briony remains hopeful of finding her missing sister, Sarah. Meanwhile, Sarah and her best friend Aria are trapped on a remote island off the coast, and nobody has a clue where they have gone.
ABOUT KARLEAH OLSON
Karleah Olson is a Perth-based writer and an avid reader. She has spent the last few years as a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University studying Australian Coastal Gothic Literature. Her debut novel A Wreck of Seabirds was shortlisted for the 2023 Fogarty Literary Award.
Daring Conversations: Dervla McTiernan
We are very proud to be supporting this exciting literary discussion with a local-international star!
Ross Barron, Head of Wesley College, will be leading a fascinating conversation with the international best-selling and award-winning author Dervla McTiernan.
She is the critically acclaimed author of five novels, including The Murder Rule, which was a New York Times thriller of the year. Dervla has won multiple prizes, including a Ned Kelly Award, Davitt Awards, a Barry Award, and an International Thriller Writers Award. Dervla is also proud Wesley parent. We love her here at Crow!
Tickets are just $5 and all proceeds go towards Wesley College Library diversity collection. Books will be available to purchase on the night. RSVP now!
How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up by Lisa Collyer – Book Launch
Join us on Wednesday the 9th of September for the launch of Lisa Collyer’s debut poetry collection, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up.
Daniel Juckes, editor of Westerly Magazine will be emcee and Lucy Dougan, poet, mentor and editor will be launching the collection.
How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems on the taboo and abject bodies of women. Collyer refuses selflessness, tackling the disquieting dilemmas of feminine space with erotic and comic freedom.
This title was shortlisted for the eminent Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript.
Judges’ comments:
‘Searing poetry of feminine experience, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is unashamedly visceral and lights up with flashes of literary incandescence. Formally inventive, bleakly comic, slyly erotic – these are poems which bristle with edges and glint like cut gems. Each poem arrives like a dare, refusing euphemism or domestication.’
Lisa Collyer is a poet and educator living and working in Boorloo (Perth). She writes poetry like the jagged edge of a can opened-up with a lens on women’s bodies. She has been published in Westerly, Cordite, Rabbit, Australian Poetry Anthology and more. She was an Inspire writer-in-residence with The National Trust of W.A. and was short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award for her unpublished manuscript.
Lucy Dougan and Michael Farrell in conversation with Chris Arnold
Join Giramondo poets Lucy Dougan and Michael Farrell as they talk with Chris Arnold about their work, including their most recent collections Monster Field and Googlecholia, both published last year.
Dougan’s Monster Field was released in December, and launched later that month in the Balmoral Hotel – the same venue where this event is being held. The collection draws on and is alive to the mysterious zone that Surrealist artist Paul Nash called the ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed which cannot be found again easily, and which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past your eyes’.
Farrell’s Googlecholia was released in October, and went on to be longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal. As its title suggests, the collection refers to the many-armed search engine, with the poems within alluding to the range of emotional affects and feelings that the Internet induces: pleasure, satisfaction, joy, melancholy, anxiety, schadenfreude, boredom, nausea.
Books by Dougan and Farrell will be sold on the night through Crow Books.
Please arrive at 5.30pm for a 6pm start. While this event is free, RSVPs are strongly encouraged – register via eventbrite here.
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ABOUT LUCY DOUGAN
Lucy Dougan’s first poetry book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award. The manuscript of her second collection, White Clay, won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton Award – it was published by Giramondo in 2008. Her chapbooks Meanderthals (Web Del Sol) and Against Lawns (Picaro) were published in 2011. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. Her latest collection is Monster Field, published in 2022. She works in the arts and university sectors.
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ABOUT MICHAEL FARRELL
Michael Farrell’s collections published by Giramondo include a raiders guide (2008); open sesame (2011), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry; Cocky’s Joy (2015), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry; and I Love Poetry, which won the 2018 Queensland Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Award; and Googlecholia (2022), longlisted for the 2023 ALS Gold Medal.
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ABOUT CHRIS ARNOLD
Chris Arnold is a poet and programmer who lives and works in Boorloo. His Creative Writing PhD, in the field of electronic literature, was honoured on the UWA Dean’s list. Chris’s poems were shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2023.
Book Launch: Monster Field by Lucy Dougan
Join us to celebrate the launch of Monster Field, the new collection by award-winning WA poet Lucy Dougan.
Western Australia has a world-class poet on its hands in Lucy Dougan. – Kevin Brophy
In her poems of interiors and exteriors, of the familiar and quotidian, of controlled considerations of ‘the immediate’, Dougan is building a vision of meaningful survival, of continuance fused with change. – John Kinsella
Dougan’s poetry is profoundly youthful, alive with compassion and uncynical intelligence. – Lucy Van
This month, Giramondo is proud to release Monster Field, the new collection by the award-winning West Australian poet, Lucy Dougan. Drawing its title from a phenomenon coined by Surrealist artist Paul Nash, the collection engages and writes through that strange, elusive plane that exists on the extreme margins of perception and at the ‘intersection between the absolutely ordinary and the occult’.
Monster Field will have its official launch on Thursday 24th October upstairs at The Balmoral Hotel in East Victoria Park. The launch speech will be presented by Josephine Wilson, the Miles Franklin-winning author of Extinctions, followed by readings from the book by Dougan.
We are so excited to host this event! Copies of Monster Field will be available for purchase on the night, as well as Dougan’s earlier collections White Clay and The Guardians.
Light refreshments will be provided to guests, with a bar tab for early arrivals.
This event is free, but RSVP is essential. Please register through Eventbrite to attend.
*The Balmoral Hotel is an 18+ venue but minors may attend if accompanied by a guardian.
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ABOUT MONSTER FIELD
Lucy Dougan’s new collection draws on and is alive to the mysterious zone that Surrealist artist Paul Nash called the ‘Monster Field’: the place glimpsed from a car at speed which cannot be found again easily, and which opens up a space between the everyday and the occult as it ‘almost slides past your eyes’. Like a monster, ‘elusive and ubiquitous’, a poem is a ‘showing’ of what is both unsettling and familiar. In the world of everyday perception, mundane or discarded objects, fleeting scenes and inconsequential places can become unexpectedly charged with momentary significance and rise up as weird extremities in the field of the ordinary. Dougan’s ongoing concerns – the hidden or unperceived, things out of place, the intrusion of wildness into ordered spaces, in art and film, the shifting relationship between past and present – are deepened in this new collection by the disorientations of middle age: in experiences of survival, difficulty, and failure; in the presence and pressure of mystery; and in her conviction of what is sustainable in the making of things and in living.
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ABOUT LUCY DOUGAN
Lucy Dougan’s first poetry book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award. The manuscript of her second collection, White Clay, won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton Award – it was published by Giramondo in 2008. Her chapbooks Meanderthals (Web Del Sol) and Against Lawns (Picaro) were published in 2011. Her third collection, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for both the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, and won the 2016 West Australian Premier’s Poetry Award. She works in the arts and university sectors.
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ABOUT JOSEPHINE WILSON
Josephine Wilson is a Lecturer in English and Creative Arts at Murdoch University. Her novel Extinctions (UWA Publishing, 2016) won the 2017 Miles Franklin Award, the Colin Roderick Award, and was nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literature Award. Her first novel was Cusp, (UWA Publishing, 2005). Her creative output includes performance, poetry, essay and reviews.
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Book Launch UWAP: Four Rivers, Deep Maps
You are warmly invited to the booklanch for Four Rivers, Deep Maps
Collected Responses on the Don and Dee Rivers (North-East Scotland) and the Derbarl Yerrigan and Dyarlgarro Beeliar (Swan and Canning Rivers, Western Australia).
The cities – Perth, Australia, and Aberdeen, Scotland – have received relatively little attention as specific geographical–cultural locales. Often perceived as industrial, isolated and lacking romantic association, they nevertheless have rich historical, narrative and creative traditions that characterise interactions between humans and place, particularly along the length of the four rivers. Anyone who heard the cities Perth and Aberdeen mentioned in the same sentence would likely assume the subject was fossil fuel mining and refining, or perhaps to do with migration and the ongoing nature of the Scottish diaspora.
Millions of years after the gas seam or oil deposit was formed the land continues to shape the ways we reside and our relationship to the land and water.
As is sometimes the way of things, an embodied connection to place, especially out-of-the-way ones, gives rise to lively subcultures that resist the capitalist and expansionist imperatives that seem to define the history of a location. This volume arose from the cross-pollination of the intellectual and the aesthetic. The contributions of this book are woven together through strands of deep mapping and ideas of place, history and inhabitation. Countercultures seem to return to specific place knowledge that predates industrialisation, whether in the traditional shapes of the Nyoongar knowledge of the Derbarl Yarrigan (Swan River) and Beeliar (Canning River) or the traditions and ancient patterns of Aberdeenshire: we come back to these profound knowledge systems that, in fact, never went away.
Please join us for this fantastic launch. Light refreshments will be provided. Books will be available to purchase.
This event is free – click here to register.
Writing Wa Presents UWRF22: Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2022
An exciting cultural fusion literary event!
Since its foundation in 2004, the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF) has evolved into Indonesia’s leading platform for showcasing its writers, artists and diverse Indigenous cultures. Under the direction of Janet DeNeefe, UWRF has also grown into one of the world’s most celebrated literary events – an annual pilgrimage for lovers of literature and conversation.
Writing WA’s relationship with Janet DeNeefe and UWRF now spans more than a decade. During this period Writing WA has sponsored more than 30 WA writers and illustrators to travel to Bali to participate in this prestigious festival.
More recently Writing WA joined hands with our friends at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival to bring an authentic experience of the Festival to Perth. In an exclusive partnership between our two organisations, the inaugural Ubud Writers and Readers Festival Perth was presented October 2021.
We are delighted to be supporting the festival again for its 2022 return. Join us at The Rechabite Hall in Northbridge for three days of literature, food, film and great conversations.
Some of the fantastic events on offer include:
- All in a Flash with Laura Keenan, Mabel Gibson, Paul J. Laverty, Meg Anderson and Amy Budrikis.
- Whitewashing with Siang Lu and Dr Chris Lin
- The Writing Life with Emily Brugman, Jennifer Down, and Gillian O’Shaughnessy
- Writing About Trauma with Tim Baker, Jane Castle, Michelle Johnston, and Dawn Barker.
- Pulling No Punches with Michael Burrows, Holden Sheppard, and Jennifer Down, moderated by Christine Layton.
- Beacon of Hope: The Human Experience of Conflict with Max Rosochinsky, Oksana Maksymchuk, Hassan Al Nawwab and Natalie D-Napoleon
- & HEAPS more!
We hope to see you there!
Click here to view the full program and purchase tickets.
In conversation with Elaine Pearson
Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World
In her new book, Chasing Wrongs and Rights, Murdoch University Alumnus, Elaine Pearson shares her experiences defending human rights – from human trafficking in Nepal to the ‘drug war’ in the Philippines to treatment of detainees in Papua New Guinea and in Australia – offering an extremely involving personal account of how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve got to go.
Crow Books is proud to be supporting this event. Please join us for a unique opportunity to see Elaine in conversation with Murdoch Law School’s SCALES Director Associate Professor Anna Copeland as they discuss human rights and Elaine’s new book.
About Elaine Pearson
Elaine Pearson is the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch. She established Human Rights Watch’s Australia office in 2013 and works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. Pearson writes frequently for a range of publications and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Foreign Policy and the Washington Post. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales, on the advisory committee of UNSW’s Australian Human Rights Institute and on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.
Book Launch: Acanthus by Claire Potter
Join the acclaimed WA poet Claire Potter in conversation with Professor Daniel Brown on her new collection, Acanthus.
Please join us to celebrate the WA launch of Acanthus (Giramondo, March 2022), a collection ten years in the making by one of Australia’s richest lyrical poets, Claire Potter.
The event will take place on 5 October at the University of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, with the book launched by Professor Daniel Brown.
Crow Books is proud to be selling copies of Acanthus on the night of the launch, and can be signed by Potter. Guests will be served drinks.
This event is free, but RSVP is essential. Please click here to register via Eventbrite.
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ABOUT ACANTHUS
Acanthus offers a collection of poems that dwell in the landscapes of the northern and southern hemispheres, evoking myth and fantasy and romance, as they move between observation and imagination. At the heart of Potter’s poetry is a keen awareness of the power of transformation, which brings the celestial and the physical, the imagined and the real closer to hand. The poems hold an ear to those wandering figures who, like Icarus, search the peripheries of those adjoining worlds for a way through, but instead often fall against the clockwork of the ordinary. Surreal gardens, repetitive geometry, rooms of clouds, witches and monsters, lie not outside the natural world but directly within it, mixing poetry and quotation, dream with prose. Each poem lies at an angle to the next, sitting as if within the net of a wider page, seeking to embody the radical arc of reading, reverie, and falling through literary spaces.
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ABOUT CLAIRE POTTER
Claire Potter was born in Perth and received an Australian Young Poets Fellowship from the Poets Union to write her first collection. She is the author of two full-length collections and two chapbooks as well as numerous essays and translations. Her poetry has been shortlisted for Premier’s Prizes, published in Poetry Chicago, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, New Statesman, and Poetry Ireland Review and translated into French and Chinese. She teaches at the Architectural Association London where she runs the AAWriting Centre.
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ABOUT PROFESSOR DANIEL BROWN
Professor Daniel Brown is currently Visiting Professor at Birkbeck, University of London. The author of two books on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and another entitled The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense, he has written various essays on Thomas De Quincey, William Wordsworth, Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, George Egerton, Thom Gunn, and Billy Wilder. He is currently writing a monograph on poetry and the place of women in Victorian science.
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Book Launch: Fromage by Sally Scott
We invite you to join Sally Scott as she celebrates the launch of her debut novel, Fromage.
Fans of MC Beaton, Kerry Greenwood and Richard Osman will love Sally Scott’s Alex Grant whodunnit series. Addictive without the additives, this lactose-doting, high-heel toting amateur sleuth sniffs out a mystery that will keep you on your toes from her very first bite of Croatia’s flaky pastries right to her date with the delectable but dangerous cheeseboards of Margaret River.
Launched by David Whish-Wilson, the book will be available to be purchased and signed on the day.
Entry is free, bottomless wine and champagne will be provided, with a wine tasting and a giant wheel of cheese. Bookings are essential and COVID-19 restrictions may apply.
Sally asks that everyone come along with one piece of clothing which represents the 1990s. Shoulder pads, double denim, ripped jeans – it’s your choice.
We are so excited to be supporting this launch with Fremantle Press. We hope to see you there – get ready to celebrate!
Click here to view ticket information.
Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2021
Bringing one of the world’s best literary festivals to the Perth CBD.
Crow Books is proud to support the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF): one of the world’s most celebrated literary events – an annual pilgrimage for lovers of literature and conversation.
Since its foundation in 2004, UWRF has evolved into Indonesia’s leading platform for showcasing its writers, artists and diverse Indigenous cultures.
In 2021, UWRF is set to be a jam-packed hybrid event combining live events and presenters on the ground at The Rechabite Hall in Northbridge (Perth) and also in Bali, with online participation from interstate and international presenters. These events will also be live streamed and allow for interaction in real time with live audiences in both locations and with online audiences everywhere.
Some of the star-studded presentations include…
- Media and Memoir with Julia Baird, Desi Anwar, and Gillian O’Shaughnessy
- Self Reflection and Loving Kindness with Bridget Lowry
- Weaving Mythical Characters and Magical Realism with Ayu Utami, Rebecca Higgie, and Professor Krishna Sen
- Women of a Certain Rage with Anne Aly, Meg McKinlay, Victoria Midwinter Pitt, and Gillian O’Shaughnessy
- First Nations Poets with Elfie Shiosaki, Jarrad Travers and Cass Lynch
The full Ubud Writers & Readers Festival for 2021 will commence on 8 October with the launch of UWRF Perth. Following three days of UWRF Perth, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival will continue in Bali until 18 October. To view the full program and more, click here.
Book Launch: Small Steps by Julie Sprigg
Please join Julie Sprigg, Fremantle Press and Crow Books to celebrate the launch of Small Steps: A Physio in Ethiopia.
- To be launched by Anne-Louise Willoughby, author of Nora Heysen: A Portrait.
- Bookings essential via: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/book-launch-small-steps-a-physio-in-ethiopia-by-julie-sprigg-tickets-116078482867
- Ticket cost $5 (plus eventbrite booking fee). Book now as places are limited.
- Ticket proceeds will be donated to 100 Women , a Perth based women’s philanthropic foundation.
- Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
- Refreshments available to purchase from the venue.
About the Book
As a child, Julie dreamed of being somewhere else, of making a difference. Now, she can’t wait to meet the nuns she will live with and the children she will provide physiotherapy for in Ethiopia.
But Julie has trouble sticking to convent rules and soon finds herself wondering how much difference a single physio can make anyway.
When she takes a teaching role at a university, Julie finally feels closer to fulfilling her dreams – training Ethiopia’s first physiotherapists, treating paediatric patients, and losing her heart to a handsome colleague.
Then civil unrest reaches the university, forcing Julie’s students to choose between their safety and their future. When it comes to being a part of change, why do all steps feel like small steps?
About Julie Sprigg
Julie Sprigg is a Perth-based author whose debut book Small Steps: A Physio in Ethiopia was shortlisted for the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. She worked as a physiotherapist for ten years before switching to a career in foreign aid with programs improving the rights of people with disabilities. After years of regular travel to China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Vanuatu and Ethiopia, Julie returned to Perth and now evaluates government programs to overcome social disadvantage. When not writing or working, she can be found reading a picture book atlas with her young son and delighting in domestic adventures.
Book Launch – The Dancer in Your Hands by Jo Pollit
We are excited to welcome this unique collection of poetry to the world.
Books will be for sale at the event thanks to Crow Books. Light food will be provided, and drinks will be available from the bar at a special launch discount.
Registration essential. Please register at:
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/book-launch-the-dancer-in-your-hands-by-jo-pollitt-tickets-115675621899
This is a free event.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Originally submitted as part of Pollitt’s PhD in 2018, the dancer in your hands is an unique exploration of the nature and phsyicality of dance represented through language, text and design.
‘The dancer in your hands < > is a superb and compellingly sustained poetic work. It mobilises striking innovations in notation, such as punctuation marks making visible the energetic, choreographic, and imaginative aspects of dance. As a book the dancer in your hands enacts the virtual, temporalized tremor, becoming a seismograph of latent bodily event. Refusing gendered binaries Pollitt engages in an erotics of the interstices, celebrating both the elongation of the moment and the exhilaration of the fugitive, or what the dancer-poet calls the radical impermanence of dance.’
Marion May Campbell
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jo Pollitt is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, whose work is grounded in a twenty-year practice of improvisation across multiple performed, choreographic and publishing platforms. As dancer, choreographer, writer and dramaturg, her work has been presented locally and internationally. Jo has taught improvisation to several generations of dancers at WAAPA, she is co-founder and director of the creative arts publication BIG Kids Magazine, co-founder of the feminist research collective The Ediths at ECU and artist-researcher with #FEAS -Feminist Educators Against Sexism. In 2019 Jo was awarded the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts Research Medal. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University.
Invisible Boys – Holden Sheppard in Conversation
Crow Books is delighted to host an evening with award winning Young Adult author Holden Sheppard to discuss his debut novel, Invisible Boys.
Join us to hear Holden in conversation with Alicia Tuckerman.
Ticket Cost: $5
Your ticket cost is redeemable against the purchase of a copy Invisible Boys on the night.
Drinks can be purchased at the bar.
Bookings: https://www.trybooking.com/560446
Book now as places are limited.
About Holden and his book:
In a small town, everyone thinks they know you: Charlie is a hardcore rocker, who’s not as tough as he looks. Hammer is a footy jock with big AFL dreams, and an even bigger ego. Zeke is a shy over-achiever, never macho enough for his family. But all three boys hide who they really are. When the truth is revealed, will it set them free or blow them apart?
Holden Sheppard is an award-winning Young Adult author born and bred in Geraldton, Western Australia. His debut novel, Invisible Boys, won the 2018 City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award and the 2017 Ray Koppe Residency Award, and was Highly Commended in the 2018 ASA Emerging Writers’ Mentorship Prize.Holden’s novella ‘Poster Boy’ won the 2018 Novella Project competition and was published in Griffith Review. His true story ‘Fight, Deny, Delete’ was published in the 2019 Margaret River Press anthology Bright Lights, No City. Holden’s short fiction has been published in page seventeen and Indigo, and he has also written for Ten Daily, Huffington Post, ABC, DNA Magazine and FasterLouder. He graduated with Honours from Edith Cowan University’s writing program and won a prestigious Australia Council ArtStart grant in 2015. Holden serves as the Deputy Chair of WritingWA, and as an ambassador for Lifeline WA.
Holden has always been a misfit: a gym junkie who has played Pokemon competitively, a sensitive geek who loves aggressive punk rock, and a bogan who learned to speak French.
About Alicia Tuckerman:
Alicia Tuckerman is a driving force for young LGBT voices within Australia. Author of If I Tell You, Alicia was raised in rural NSW before she left home at the age of sixteen, she accepted a position to study at the Hunter School of Performing Arts.
Described as having an overactive imagination as a child, she recalls writing stories her entire life. Alicia attributes surviving her teenage years to the comfort, release and escape writing offered and she hopes to inspire the next generation of readers and writers to embrace their true passions.
Alicia was inspired to write If I Tell You after finding a lack of YA novels featuring two central lesbian characters. She draws on her life experiences to explore the joys, triumphs and cruelties of modern day adolescence and considers there is no fantasy world she could create that is more terrifyingly beautiful than the one we’re expected to live in.
Book Launch – The Palace of Angels by Mohammed Massoud Morsi
Join Centre for Stories, Wild Dingo Press and Crow Books in celebrating the release of The Palace of Angels by Mohammed Massoud Morsi.
- To be launched by storyteller and author, Sisonke Msimang.
- Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
- This is a free event.
- RSVPs essentail via Centre for Stories https://centreforstories.com/event/book-launch-the-palace-of-angels/#book-tickets
The Palace of Angels is a collection of three stories praised by the likes of Geraldine Brooks and Ilan Pappé (Noam Chomsky’s co-author).
The stories are discrete and exquisitely written, set in Palestine from the 1990s to the present day. The reader is lead to question how we discover who we really are, and what we wish to become. The stories are united in exposing ‘the clash between love and hate, revenge and compassion, within an impossible and abnormal reality of occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing’ (Ilan Pappé).
Vital, brutal and tender, The Palace of the Angels is written with the urgency of breaking news and the delicacy of poetry. This is Morsi at his passionate best. — Geraldine Brooks
Book Launch – Special by Melanie Dimmitt
Join Crow Books and Ventura Press in celebrating the launch Special by Melanie Dimmitt
- Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
- Light refreshments provided.
- RSVPs essential via https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/a-very-special-book-launch-tickets-65167517800
- This is a free event.
Most of us expect to meander through the motions of love, marriage and (textbook) baby in the carriage, but once in a while life has something a little more special in store…
Special is an uplifting, candid companion for those in the early stages of navigating a child’s disability, offering honest, reassuring and relatable insight into a largely unknown (and so, initially terrifying) part of our world.
It features antidotes to the obsessions at the forefront of a newly minted special-needs parent’s mind: Why has this happened to me? Will I ever stop comparing my child to typical children? How will my relationship survive? Will I be able to work again? Should I have another baby? And the big one: What will my future look like?
Inspired by the author’s own crash-landing into special-needs parenthood, and shaped by her conversations with parents of children with wide-ranging disabilities, alongside specialists, psychologists and researchers, Special shares stories, guidance and simple coping strategies to soothe and surprise anyone whose life has taken an unexpected turn.
About the Author
Melanie Dimmitt is an Australian journalist who has written for publications including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Collective Hub magazine, Broadsheet, The Tot and Mama Disrupt magazine, and has created content for Smack Bang Designs and You & Co Media.
A Perth native, who has also lived in Melbourne and London, Melanie currently lives in Sydney with her partner and two young children.
PRAISE FOR SPECIAL
‘Raw, brave and compelling. This book airs a parent’s most guilt-riddled thoughts and then turns them on their head.’
MIA FREEDMAN
‘Special is so beautifully written, touching, helpful and insightful. I wish, wish, wish I had it ten years ago! If I had known the joy and happiness being a special-needs mother would bring, my blanket of suffering would have been lifted. It’s going to be a lifesaver for special needs parents.’
ONDINE SHERMAN
‘Bold, honest, sometimes funny and always illuminating without being didactic, Special will shatter your heart and put it back together again. This book will do much good in the world.’
LEE KOFMAN
Curtin Annual Human Rights Lecture
Curtin University, through the Centre for Human Rights Education (CHRE) is proud to present the 2019 Annual Human Rights Lecture, delivered by journalist, writer, filmmaker and refugee advocateBehrouz Boochani.
Tickets
- Bookings essential via the link below.
- This is a free event.
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/curtin-annual-human-rights-lecture-tickets-60292796377
About the lecture
The Curtin Annual Human Rights Lecture, established in 2016, is a key initiative of the CHRE. In 2019, Behrouz Boochani will deliver a presentation by a combination of video and live link from Manus Island where he has been forced to remain since seeking asylum in Australia in 2013.
In his forthcoming lecture Mr Boochani will focus on the refugee experience through the lens of human rights and politics. In his words: “I will explore the role of art and literature as an important language to challenge Australia’s inhumane detention systems and refugee policies and share my experience as a person who has been fighting against what I see as dehumanisation.”
The inaugural Human Rights Lecture was delivered by Professor Gillian Triggs, Former President of the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2016, and by Dr Waleed Aly, media commentator and academic in 2017, and last year the Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG delivered the lecture.
About Behrouz Boochani
Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet and film producer. He was born in western Iran and has been held on Manus Island since 2013. Boochani is the co-director, along with Iranian film maker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, of the documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, has published numerous articles in leading media internationally about the plight of refugees held by the Australian Government on Manus Island, and has won several international literary, film and human rights awards.
His memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Nonfiction in January 2019. The book was tapped out on a mobile phone in a series of single messages over time and translated from Persian into English by Omid Tofighian.
Book Launch – 6222 Syllables by Sarah Furtner
Join Crow Books in celebrating the release of 6222 Syllables by Sarah Furtner.
- Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
- Light refreshments provided.
- This is a free event.
- RSVP via the Facebook event page https://www.facebook.com/events/510794636113201 or email books@crowbooks.com.au
About the book:
6222 Syllables is Sarah Furtner’s debut collection of poetry, featuring 366 haikus.
Sarah looks at love,
suburban life, Instagram,
friendship and laundry.
She has a laugh at
‘Reality TV’, and
feeling like a fraud.
She also explores
drinking, family and her
hopes for the future.
Book Launch: Stratos Gazis Crime Series by Pol Koutsakis
Join Crow Books and Bitter Lemon Press in celebrating the launch of Stratos Gazis crime series by Pol Koutsakis.
- Pol Koutsakis in coversation with David Whish-Wilson
- Copies of the books, Athenian Blues and Baby Blue will be available for purchase and signing.
- Light refreshments provided.
- This is a free event.
About Athenian Blues:
Stratos Gazis hates being called a contract killer. What he is, is a conscientious fixer. He fixes problems that are only mentioned in whispers. That very few can fix. Things that people are willing to pay handsomely to get done, without wanting to know about the small stuff – just that the job was carried out. Stratos is their man, provided that his meticulous research shows him that the targets deserve their fate.
But now, in the midst of the Greek economic crisis and political turmoil, this film-noir loving assassin with the strict moral code is about to get involved in the most high-profile case of his contract killer career. He finds himself caught between the most beloved lawyer in Greece, known as “the guardian of the poor”, and his actress and model wife, the most desirable woman in the country. They are both in dire need of his killing services, but which one is telling the truth?
Book Launch: Falling Backwards by Jo Jones
Join Crow Books and UWA Publishing in celebrating the release of Falling Backwards: Australian Historical Fiction and the History Wars by Jo Jones
- Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
- Light refreshments provided.
- This is a free event.
- RSVP to books@crowbooks.com.au
To be launched by Paul Genoni, Associate Professor within the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University.
About the book:
Some stories are hard to tell. During a period known as the Australian History Wars, consideration of the national past was vexed, contested territory. There was marked vitriol – to an unprecedented extent – in public debate about the “reality” and interpretation of the events of colonisation. This study investigates the output of novelists who were brave enough to contribute to this vital cultural moment and the issues of politics and form they attempted to negotiate.