Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 03 May
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Who tells the story of a country? What story does a country’s national literature tell about its people and its identity? Is there such a thing as Australian literature at all?
Australians are striding the global stage with unprecedented confidence in all manner of fields. But if university syllabuses are any indication, it seems that when it comes to Australian literature, the cultural cringe is alive and well.
With major universities offering only the bare minimum in courses on Australian writing and its authors, the Wheeler Centre is filling the breach. Australian Literature 101 is the university education in Australian literature you never had.
In this major new weekly series hosted by Ramona Koval, running in parallel with the university calendar, contemporary writers speak on seminal Australian texts, giving context, sharing their responses and exploring each work’s status as a classic of Australian literature. Join us to be part of a brand new assessment of our national literature.
Featuring
Ramona Koval
Ramona Koval is a writer who has worked as a journalist and broadcaster. Her most recent books are A Letter to Layla: Travels to our Deep Past and Near Future, Bloodhound: Searching For My Father, and ...
Hilary McPhee
Hilary McPhee was a founding director of McPhee Gribble Publishers and a Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts, the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a founding director of New Matilda.com.
In recent years she has been living in the Middle East and Italy writing a book and articles about the region. She has returned to Melbourne and her selection of new Australian writing, Wordlines, was published last year. She has recently edited and contextualised the diaries of Tim Burstall from the early 1950s which MUP published in February and is now working on a companion volume to Other People’s Words.