The Garret: Writing & Publishing

Sam Elkin's debut memoir is Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga.

Sam’s essays have been published in the Griffith Review, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and Kill Your Darlings.

He co-edited Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia .

He hosts the 3rrr radio show Queer View Mirror and is a Tilde Film Festival board member. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host A...

Laurie Steed is a novelist and short story writer. Greater City Shadows, his short story collection, was shortlisted for the 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He also published a memoir, Love Dad: Confessions of an Anxious Father, in 2023.

His fiction has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in The Age, Meanjin, Overland, Island, Westerly, and elsewhere.

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and ...

Kate Larsen is a writer, poet and arts and cultural consultant with more than 25 years’ experience in the non-profit, government and cultural sectors in Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom. She is one of the contributors behind The Relationship Is the Project.

Kate is a thought leader in the areas of arts governance and cultural leadership, workplace culture and wellbeing, online communication and communities, and being an ally ...

James Bradley is a writer and critic. He has returned to non-fiction with his latest work, Deep Water: The world in the ocean. His previous books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. 

His essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review and Meanjin. In 2012 he...

Amanda Lohrey writes fiction and non-fiction. Her latest novel, The Conversion, was released in 2023. Her previous novel, The Labyrinth (2021), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, a Tasmanian Literary Award and the Voss Literary Prize.

Amanda is also regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and a former senior fellow of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. 

About The Garret

Follow The G...

Nam Le is one of Australia's foremost poets. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised, and taught. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is his first poetry collection.

Nam has received major awards in America, Europe, and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literar...

Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, Canada. Between 2015 and 2023 she was the editor of the online journal of criticism, the Sydney Review of Books. In this period she also edited four anthologies of Australian critical writing, most recently Critic Swallows Book.

Her newsletter on literature and the internet, Infra Dig.

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwa...

Sara Saleh is a writer/poet, human rights lawyer, and the daughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian migrants. In 2023 she published her first novel, 'Songs for the Dead and the Living', as well as her first poetry collection 'The Flirtation of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat'.

Sara is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poems, essays and short stories have b...

Tracey Lien was born and raised in southwestern Sydney and now lives in Brooklyn. All That’s Left Unsaid is her debut novel, and it won the Indie Book Awards for Debut Fiction, the MUD Literary Prize, the Davitt Award for Best Adult Novel and the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize.

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at ...

Christos Tsiolkas is one of Australia's most accomplished writers. His latest novel, In-Between, is an exploration of class, family and love in middle age.

Christos is the author of eight novels, including Loaded (which was made into the feature film Head-On) and the international bestseller The Slap (which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, among many other honours). His ...

Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Bindi, Kindred and Returning. Her play, Going Home, is in development, as is her first novel, Yaraman. In 2022 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts.

You can read the transcript of this interview here. Kirli has a lso spoken on The Garret before about her verse novel Bindi.

About The Gar...

Richard Flanagan is a Tasmania writer. Question 7, his latest work, was published in 2023 and will no doubt become that rare thing - a commercial bestseller that attracts critical acclaim.

His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker ...

Beejay Silcox is a writer and literary critic. She is the Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival, and in 2023-2-24 the Chair of Judges of The Stella Prize.

Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. 

Read the transcript for this inter...

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the memoir The Hate Race and the poetry collections Carrying the World and How Decent Folk Behave. Her children's picture books include the CBCA Honour book The Patchwork Bike and the illustrated poem When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal.

Her latest poetry collection is It's the Sound of the Thing, which was...

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills.

Her debut novel was the wildly successful The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020), which was based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho (2023) is her second work of historical fiction, and exists in the same world as The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Read th...

Debra Dank is a Gudanji/Wakaja writer and educator. Her 2023 memoir We Come With This Place - a book she never intended to publish - won the ALS Gold Medal and four NSW Premier's Awards, and was also listed for many other prizes.

An educator, she has worked in teaching and learning for many years – a gift given through the hard work of her parents. She continues to experience the privilege of living with country and with family. De...

Lucy Treloar is a novelist. Her debut, Salt Creek, won the Dobbie Literary Award among others and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UK's Walter Scott Prize. Wolfe Island, her second novel, won the Barbara Jefferis Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's and NSW literary awards.

Lucy's essays and short fiction have appeared in publications including Meanjin, The Age, Overland and Best Australia...

Brigid Mullane is a publisher at Ultimo Press, and in this interview she discusses her career and her path into publishing.

She was previously Managing Editor at Hachette, Editor of Kill Your Darlings, and Communications Manager at Writers Victoria. She has also worked in a variety of roles at Melbourne Writers Festival, National Young Writers’ Festival, Emerging  Writers’ Festival, the Sun Bookshop and the Brunswick Street Booksto...

Tony Birch is an activist, historian and essayist. In this interview Tony reflects on his most recent novel, Women and Children.

His works include The White Girl (winner of the 2020 NSW Premier's Award for Indigenous Writing and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Prize), Ghost River (winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing), and Blood (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Aw...