Better Read Than Dead is proud to be part of Newtown Festival again this year, supporting Newtown Neighbourhood Centre to do amazing things for our community. Funds raised from the below events directly support NNC, funding frontline services for those doing it tough in the Inner West.
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WEDNESDAY 31 OCTOBER
Unfettered and Alive: Anne Summers in-conversation Wednesday 31 October at 6.30pm Upstairs at Better Read 'I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me. We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all. We were meant to fade into invisibility as we aged. I defied all of these expectations and so have millions of women like me.' Join Anne Summers, in conversation with... to discuss her inspiring autobiography Unfettered and Alive; the exhilarating story of Anne's extraordinary career as a journalist, author, policy maker, political advisor, bureaucrat, board member, editor, publisher, and political activist. Her story has her travelling around the world as she moves from job to job, in newspapers and magazines, advising prime ministers, leading feminists’ debates, presiding over Greenpeace International, writing memorable and influential books. Anne has not been afraid to walk away from success and to satisfy her constant restlessness by charging down new and risky paths. Whatever position she has held, she has expanded what's possible and helped us see things differently. Anne shares revealing stories about the famous and powerful people she has worked with or reported on and is refreshingly frank about her own anxieties and mistakes as well as her at times heart-breaking family story of violence and ultimate reconciliation. Unfettered and Alive is a provocative and inspiring memoir by a woman who broke through so many boundaries to show what women can do. 10% of all book sales will go directly to the NNC. |
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THURSDAY 1 NOVEMBER
The World Was Whole: Fiona Wright at Camperdown Commons Thursday 1 November at 6.30pm Camperdown Commons 31A Mallett St, Camperdown Our bodies and homes are our shelters, each one intimately a part of the other. But what about those who feel anxious, uncomfortable, unsettled within these havens? Join Fiona Wright for the launch of The World Was Whole, the follow-up to her award-winning essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance. To be launched by poet and author Pip Smith. Ticket is free when you pre-order a book. Drinks and nibbles will be available for purchase on the night from Acre Eatery. In The World Was Whole, Fiona Wright examines how we inhabit and remember the familiar spaces of our homes and suburbs, as we move through them and away from them into the wider world, devoting ourselves to the routines and rituals that make up our lives. These affectingly personal essays consider how all-consuming the engagement with the ordinary can be, and how even small encounters and interactions can illuminate our lives. Many of the essays are set in the inner and south-western suburbs of a major Australian city in the midst of rapid change. Others travel to the volcanic coastline of Iceland, the mega-city of Shanghai, the rugged Surf Coast of southern Victoria. The essays are poetic and observant, and often funny, animated by curiosity and candour. Beneath them all lies the experience of chronic illness and its treatment, and the consideration of how this can reshape and reorder our assumptions about the world and our place within it. Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Award. Her first poetry collection, Knuckled, won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre. Her poems and essays have been published in the Australian, Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Seizure and HEAT. 10% of all book sales will go directly to the NNC. |