Eight books to read ahead of this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival
words by daisy henry and veronica sullivan
For your TBR.
You’re spoilt for choice in Melbourne when it comes to ways to fill up your weekend. From month-long events like the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, to store openings, exhibitions and pop-ups, it’s not a matter of what’s on but what to choose.
However, one annual event we’ll always drop everything to attend is the Melbourne Writers’ Festival (MWF). Celebrating 40 years, MWF is a gathering of all things literary. Running from May 7 to 10, it features a series of author talks with both industry heavyweights and emerging voices, including R.F Kuang, Madison Griffiths, Bri Lee, Evelyn Araluen and more.
For more author interviews and book recommendations, head to our Life section.
As the Festival Director and CEO of MWF, Veronica Sullivan plays a key role in curating and shaping each year’s lineup – and a major part of this involves being incredibly well read. Below, Veronica shares eight books written by authors featured in this year’s lineup for your reading list.
Sweet Nothings by Madison Griffiths
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Madison Griffiths writes about the intersections of gender, class and power with nuance, care and clear-eyed insight. Her debut book, Tissue, was a meditative consideration of abortion through a personal and cultural lens.
In her latest, Sweet Nothings, Griffiths recounts the experiences of four very different women who enter into romantic and sexual relationships with their university professors. Through the women’s stories, she explores the complexities of relationships within academia, where ambition and power imbalances are intrinsic. It’s a perfect read for anyone who loved Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women.
You can hear Maddison speak at Sex, Love and Other Catastrophes and Looking at Women, Looking at War: Cities of Literature Book Club.
Get it here.
Hekate: The Witch by Nikita Gill
In her incredible verse novel, acclaimed Irish-Indian poet and playwright Nikita Gill reenvisions the story of the Greek goddess Hekate: a liminal figure who guides souls to the Underworld and presides over the boundary between the living and the dead. Gill’s subversive imagining of Hekate’s journey is an unashamedly feminist retelling that breathes new life into this ancient myth, infusing her story with a search for belonging that resonates deeply with the modern condition.
You can hear Nikita speak at Nikita Gill: Hekate, Queerstories and Mythical Retellings.
Get it here.
One Hundred Flowers by Genki Kawamura
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Japanese novelist and filmmaker Genki Kawamura explores the fallibility of memory and the ways the secrets of the past intrude into the present in his latest novel, One Hundred Flowers.
Shifting between the perspective of two main characters, Yuriko, an elderly woman experiencing a slow descent into dementia and her grown son, Izumi, dealing with his own sense of loss and uncertainty about new fatherhood, this is a deeply affecting, ultimately life-affirming story about the memories that define us, what we hold onto, and what we choose to let go, from the bestselling author of If Cats Disappeared from the World.
You can hear Genki speak at Genki Kawamura: One Hundred Flowers, Genki Kawamura: From Japan to the World and Exit 8: Screening and Q&A with Genki Kawamura.
Get it here.
My Cursed Vagina by Lally Katz
In 2010, a sketchy New York psychic tells Lally Katz her vagina is cursed. Over the years that follow, Katz travels the world, and in the process finds herself caught up in a series of wild and often hilarious escapades as she encounters crushes, one-night stands and situationships.
Katz’s memoir is an exhaustively thorough, innately self-aware trip through these often-chaotic emotional and geographic landscapes. For anyone who’s felt exhausted by the modern dating landscape, My Cursed Vagina is an excruciatingly relatable account of the emotional toll of the pursuit of love, sex and meaning.
You can hear Lally Katz speak at Raging Disgracefully, Lally Katz: Writing Your Life and The Guardian’s Are You Game Show.
Get it here.
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen
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Evelyn Araluen’s poetry is infused with joy and fury, hope and despair. Her brilliant, blistering new collection The Rot ranges across environmental crisis, the absurdity of minds shaped by the internet, the violence and grief of colonisation, and the undeniable power and potency of girlhood. These are urgent, revelatory poems that push and pull at the boundaries of form and voice; that you won’t so much read as experience and absorb. The Rot demands to be read in a single sitting, but it will stay with you for a very long time.
You can hear Evelyn Araluen speak at Sintering: An Evening of Indigenous Brilliance, Burial Grounds: Indigenous Perspectives on Horror and Evelyn Araluen and Maxine Beneba Clarke: Girl, Woman, Poem.
Get it here.
Kill Your Boomers by Fiona Wright
The debut novel from one of Australia’s most astute essayists, poets and observers, Kill Your Boomers is a darkly hilarious story about the murder-inducing consequences of the housing crisis and extreme intergenerational inequality. In sharp, satirical prose laced with devastating social commentary about the demise of the Great Australian Dream of home-ownership, Fiona Wright considers what one generation owes to the next (hint: a liveable home with working aircon and no black mould would be a start…).
You can hear Evelyn Araluen speak at Queer View Mirror: Kill Your Boomers.
Get it here.
The Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander
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If there is one cookbook every Australian absolutely must own, it’s The Cook’s Companion. First published 30 years ago and often affectionately referred to as ‘the kitchen bible’, it contains over 1000 essential recipes, plus the inspiration and information required to make them.
To celebrate this milestone anniversary, Stephanie Alexander has overhauled, updated and reissued The Cook’s Companion with dozens of new recipes that bring it into the modern era and are just begging to have cooking stains splattered all over their pages. In the wise words of Nigella Lawson, ‘Anyone who cooks – or eats – needs this book.’
You can hear Stephanie Alexander speak at Stephanie Alexander: 30 Years of The Cook’s Companion.
Get it here.
Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan
Andie lives in a working-class suburb of 1970s Brisbane with a distant mother, her beloved father, and the racing greyhounds he’s raising in their garage. To Andie, the dogs are her pets, her companions, her best friends. To her dad, they’re just a means to an end.
When she wakes up one morning to find her dad and the dogs have all disappeared overnight, it sets in motion a series of events that force her to grow up fast. Tenderfoot is a big-hearted coming-of-age story that vividly brings a bygone era to life.
You can hear Toni speak at Toni Jordan and Michael Winkler: Animal Instincts.
Get it here.
Get your tickets to Melbourne Writers’ Festival here.
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