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.

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.

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.

While this event is free, registration is required. For more information about this event, or to register, please click here.

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.

  

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.

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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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.

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.’

RSVP via EventBrite

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.

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!