Katherine Brabon: Where You'll Find Me
Katherine Brabon is the author of the novels The Memory Artist, The Shut Ins and Body Friend – which was recently shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize! While her panel event at the festival has already sold out, she may just be the special guest at this event...
Which events are you looking forward to at the festival?
- Leslie Jamison and Nam Le: Forms of Life
A year in which both of these authors release new work is an exciting one, and to have them in conversation in Melbourne is extra special. In different ways, and across varied forms, both Le and Jamison’s writing takes you so deeply into experience, memory, the body, identity. To learn that they’re good friends makes this conversation even more enticing. Their work has the bracing effect we feel when reading deeply personal works that say something about humanity: reflecting parts of yourself back to you, making you understand something about yourself as well as the world. - Let It Bring Hope
This event brings together three pairings of Aboriginal and Palestinian poets, who will read new work to each other, affirming the long, shared history of solidarity and action against colonialism. I remember reading one of Sarah Saleh’s prize-winning poems a few years ago and find her work incredible. I am so glad that an event like this is taking place at Melbourne Writer’s Festival – we cannot separate the arts from what is happening in the world. To me that means we must continue to acknowledge our own history of colonial oppression, and to express our solidarity with Palestinians today. - Lauren Groff and Charlotte Wood: Silence is Golden
This topic fascinates me — delving into how Groff and Wood crafted their new novels that both centre around a woman in isolation. When a character is mostly alone, or in a lonely landscape, we as readers tend to be drawn into a very interior journey; perhaps one of memory, or transformation, or a reckoning with the character’s past and present lives. Hearing from both of these acclaimed writers on how they crafted these stories will make for a fantastic pairing, considering the very different settings and time periods of their new novels, and each writer’s individual creative processes.
What is your favourite ghost story?
I just read Jon Fosse’s novella A Shining, which is a little ghostly and more than a little haunting, and I loved it. Lost in a forest as night approaches, a man sees a white shining light that touches him with ‘something like a hand’, beginning a fleeting journey of uncertain reality - it’s an ideal introduction to Fosse’s work and the mystical realism that makes his work beguile and haunt.