HEROINES BOOK MONTH - GUESTS
AMRA PAJALIC
Biography
Amra Pajalic is an an editor, teacher and award winning author. Her debut novel The Good Daughter (Text Publishing, 2009) won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Civic Choice Award. She is co-editor of the anthology Growing up Muslim in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 2019) shortlisted for the 2015 Children’s Book Council of the Year awards. Her latest book is a family memoir Things Nobody Knows But Me (Transit Lounge, 2019) shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at La Trobe University. www.amrapajalic.com
Book Club Nomination
You Must Be Layla by Yassmin Abdel-Magied.
A beautiful novel about Layla who is of Sudanese background and who dreams of having adventures and inventions and gets a scholarship to a prestigious high school. She faces racism and discrimination but through persistence and courage finds her way. A great novel that challenges stereotypes across race and gender Layla is a strong courageous character that I loved and that speaks to young girls. Can’t wait to recommend this book to my students.
CATHY PERKINS
Biography
Cathy Perkins is a writer and editor from Sydney with an interest in the life stories of forgotten literary figures. Her recent biography The Shelf Life of Zora Cross uncovers the life of a once-famous poet, journalist and actress who published a provocative series of sonnets in 1917. TheSydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum called the book an ‘imaginatively conceived biography’ and a ‘fascinating read’, and it was shortlisted for the Australian History Prize of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Cathy edits the award-winning SL magazine and other publications at the State Library of NSW, and has worked as a book editor, literary agent, bookseller, and for the Australian Society of Authors. Her essays on Zora Cross have been published in the literary journal Meanjin.
Book Club Nomination
Friends and Rivals by Brenda Niall
Brenda Niall's Friends and Rivals is a vivid account of the intersecting lives of four Australian women writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Ethel Turner, author of the children's classic Seven Little Australians, Barbara Baynton, who wrote of the harshness of bush life, Nettie Palmer, essayist and critic, and Henry Handel Richardson, of The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney fame. Even readers unfamiliar with the work of these writers will enjoy this group biography that reveals the challenges faced by women writers and illuminates a fascinating time in Australia’s literary history.
KAREN BROOKS
Biography
Karen Brooks is the author of thirteen books, a newspaper columnist, and is an Honorary Senior Research Consultant with the University of Queensland. She has a Ph.D. in English/Cultural Studies and has published internationally on popular culture, education and social psychology. An award-winning teacher, she’s keynoted at education conferences around the country. Karen’s first historical fiction, The Brewer’s Tale, was published to critical and popular acclaim, becoming a bestseller. Her subsequent works, The Locksmith’s Daughter – an Elizabethan spy thriller - and The Chocolate Maker’s Wife, a Restoration story of love, cruelty, redemption and chocolate have been successful here and in the USA/UK. Her latest novel, The Darkest Shore, is based on the true story of a witch-hunt in Scotland in the 1700s. It features a group of feisty fishwives and covers themes such as social justice, the power of female friendship and resilience in the face of terrible odds.
Book Club Nomination
Gulliver’s Wife by Lauren Chater
While most of us either grew up with Jonathan Swift’s satirical travelogue/novel, Gulliver’s Travels, or know the extraordinary adventures of its protagonist, ship‘s surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, through various popular culture retellings, not much thought at all is given to his wife or family who were left behind. Well, Lauren Chater changes that. In Lemuel’s absence, Mary Gulliver not only provides for her family through her formidable skills as a healer and midwife, but excels. Imagine then, after attaining liberty, repaying her selfish husband’s debts and raising her children, her husband returns, expecting his household to revert back to the way it was - with him at its head and his every need and whim met.
This is the story Chater gives us - from the point of view of Mary and her daughter, Bess, with all its psychological and emotional twists and pain. In this tale, Gulliver is not the heroic survivor of ship-wreck and centre of a wondrous tale, but a narcissist, unable to see the damage his return, and inability to understand the changes that have been wrought while he was away, causes. Filled with lyrical prose, it’s a beautifully, heart-achingly told tale - realistic and raw. I was completely swept into this story and didn’t want to part with it.
LEE KOFMAN
Biography
Dr Lee Kofman is a Russian-born, Israeli-Australian author based in Melbourne. Lee holds a PhD in social sciences and MA in creative writing. She is the author of three fiction books, and memoirs Imperfect (Affirm Press, 2019), which was shortlisted for Nib Literary Award 2019 and included in Books We Loved 2019 (The Age), and The Dangerous Bride (Melbourne University Press, 2014), which was included in Best Books 2014 (The Age and Australian Book Review) and 2015 (The Age). Lee is the editor of Split (Ventura Press, 2019), which was longlisted for ABIA Awards 2020, and co-editor of Rebellious Daughters (Ventura Press, 2016), anthologies of personal essays by prominent Australian authors. Her short works have been published in Australia, Scotland, UK, Israel, USA and Canada, and her writing won numerous awards. Her blog about writing was a finalist for Best Australian Blogs 2014. Lee also teaches writing. More at www.leekofman.com.au
Book Club Nomination
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.
S.L. LIM
Biography
S. L. Lim was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney at the age of one. Their award-winning first novel Real Differences was published by Transit Lounge in 2019. They have appeared at literary festivals including Melbourne and Byron. They are a recent addition to the transnational Out of the Woods collective, investigating the twinned nightmares of capitalism and climate change. They dislike the global apartheid system of borders as should you.
Book Club Nomination
Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman
S.L has nominated Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman, for Heroines Book Club 2020.
Rat Bohemia is about AIDS, how queer people are abandoned, and the acts of courage, care and love which alleviate this abandonment. Technically sophisticated and emotionally unhinged, a novel of betrayal and yearning.
VICTORIA PURMAN
Biography
Victoria Purman is an Australian Top Ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her bestselling The Land Girls was published in April 2019. The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, a novel based on her mother’s postwar migration to Australia, was published in 2018. Her previous novel The Three Miss Allens became a USA Today bestseller in April 2019. Her next novel, The Women’s Pages, will be published in September 2020. She is a regular guest at writers festivals, is a workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.
Book Club Nomination
Victoria has nominated The Dyehouse by Mena Calthorpe, for Heroines Book Club 2020.
The Dyehouse is a masterly portrait of postwar Australia, when industrial work was radically transformed by new technologies and society changed with it. Mena Calthorpe—who herself worked in a textile factory—takes us inside this world, vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s: the bosses, middlemen and underlings; their dramatic struggles and their loves. This powerful and affecting novel was first published in 1961, and is the hundredth book in the Text Classics series.
BEM LE HUNTE
Biography
Bem Le Hunte is Indian by birthright, British by descent and Australian by choice. She is the author of several short stories and four novels. Her latest novel, Elephants with Headlights, had a carefully timed release for the month of March when the COVID-19 lockdowns began! Her first two novels, The Seduction of Silence and There, Where the Pepper Grows, have become number one bestsellers and been published internationally to critical acclaim. She is also an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, where she’s the founding Course Director of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation, a transdisciplinary, future-facing degree that teaches creativity across 25 different. Before that she had a career spanning three decades in the creative industries. She has a BA and MA in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University and a Creative Doctorate from the University of Sydney. Writinghas always been her elemental passion, and the gift of this calling has allowed her to flourish in many ways and worlds – well beyond the written word.
Book Club Nomination
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was a trailblazing imaginative exercise in understanding why there were virtually no women writers in the literary canon. Placing herself as a researcher in the 'persona' of characters like Shakespeare's sister (as talented as her brother) she explored how impossible it would have been to write fiction in that time unless you were male. She came up with the famous notion that a woman had to have a room of her own and an independent income to write fiction. Her legacy survives to this day. Without her there would possibly be no Heroine's Festival!
JULIE JANSON
Biography
Julie is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal Nation, a playwright, novelist and poet. She is a Co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019. Her writing career began when she was a teacher who wrote and directed plays in remote Northern Territory Aboriginal communities and took part in traditional Yolngu ceremonies. Fellowships include an Australia Council Developing Writer’s Fellowship, two Asialink Residencies in Indonesia and a Tyrone Guthrie Writing Residency in Ireland. She wrote her debut novel The Crocodile Hotel while living in Rome on an Australia Council BR Whiting Residency. Julie’s historical novel Benevolence Magabala 2020, is an Aboriginal response to colonization and has been long-listed for the NIB Literary Award 2020. She has ten produced plays, including two at Belvoir St Theatre, Black Mary and Gunjies. These plays are published by Aboriginal Studies Press.
Book Club Nomination
Song Spirals by the Gay’wu group of women
The Yolngu clans of North Eastern Arnhemland have shared knowledge for thousands of years. Song Spirals is a non fiction book, written by the Gay’wu group of women. It explores the essence of every clan. The women recount how they belong to the land and it belongs to them, it sings of the stories that are the heart of creation.