Laura Jean McKay: Where You'll Find Me
Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country, winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, an Australian Book Industry Award and an Aurealis Award. Her latest collection is Gunflower. You can join McKay at the festival at her workshop on writing short stories and as she shares the stage with Siang Lu at Ghost Cities and Ghost Future.
What are you looking forward to at the festival?
- This year’s festival program is scarily brilliant. I can’t wait to return to beautiful Melbourne to see Ziggy Ramo: Human? on Friday night with some of my oldest friends.
- On Saturday I’ll be learning from my heroes of writing strange women in strange places: Lauren Groff and Charlotte Woods. They’re together on stage at the same time talking about being alone in their new books, The Vaster Wilds (Groff) and Stone Yard Devotional (Woods). Groff and Woods both have sold-out events at MWF (okay yes, I missed out on tickets!) so Silence is Golden is the perfect chance to see these brilliant minds in conversation with Ailsa Piper.
- I’ll also be rushing to see Steven Mushin speak. This author-illustrator is a wizard at explaining how our climate ravaging world can be faced with humour, ‘radical creativity’ and poo cannons. I’ve been lucky enough to have followed (and sometimes been part of!) Steve’s visionary projects over the years. To see Steve speaking about his extraordinary new book Ultrawild will be ... well, it will be ultrawild!
- The highlight of the festival would have to be Let It Bring Hope. Hosted by Festival Curator Mykaela Saunders (who has just released a thrilling new collection Always Will Be), this event features absolute superstars Tony Birch, Samah Sabawi, Jeanine Leane, Micaela Sahhar, Nayuka Gorrie and Sara Saleh. The chance to see phenomenal First Nations and Palestinian authors together – whose work has wowed, challenged and motivated countless readers and writers over the years – is one not to be missed.
What ghost story haunts you?
Catherine from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights has haunted some of my favourite works (Anne Sexton’s ‘The Glass Essay’ and Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’) and she haunts me still. I love that she’s no more fixed as a character in life than she in in death – transcending that human/more-than-human boundary in a ghostly way – while the moors she wanders over are sure and (eerily) constant.