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May 17

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Sydney Writers’ Festival

Sydney Writers’ Festival is just around the corner, and features a stellar line-up that includes George Saunders, Anne Enright, Colson Whitehead, Mariko Tamaki, Fiona McFarlane, Witi Ihimaera and Krissy Kneen, and events in many locations across the city. I’m appearing on a number of panels.

First up, in Sydney Dance 1 on Thursday 25 May at 1:30pm, is It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Visions of Dystopia, with Sally Abbott, Briohny Doyle and Maria Lewis. Tickets are free.

Next is A Gathering Storm: The Rise and Rise of Cli-Fi, in the Richard Wherrett Studio at 11:30am on Friday 26 May, which also features Sally Abbott, Hannah Donnelly and Ashley Hay. Tickets are $15.

Then, on Saturday 27 May, I’m appearing at two events. The first is Keeping Company: Characters Across a Series, which is part of the Festival’s new All Day YA Program at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta, and also features Catriona Feeney, Amie Kaufman, Garth Nix, Lynette Noni. Tickets for the session are $15, and a five event pass is $50. The second event, which is back at Walsh Bay in Pier 2/3 at 4:30pm, is Dear Science, and also features Ashley Hay, Henry Marsh, Bianca Nogrady and Michael Slezak. Tickets are $20 or $15 concession.

I’m also appearing as part of two other events. The first, Close to Home, in Sydney Dance 2 at 3:00pm on Friday 26 May, is a tribute to my late friend, Georgia Blain, who died of brain cancer in December, and features readings from Georgia’s work by Tegan Bennett Daylight, Charlotte Wood and me. It should be a terrific event, and a great opportunity to celebrate Georgia’s life and work. Tickets are free.

And finally, on at 11:30am on Monday 29 May, I’ll be appearing with my partner Mardi McConnochie at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba as part of Generation Next, where we’ll both be discussing writing for younger readers. Tickets are $15, or you can buy a one day pass for $65/55, or a two day pass for $100.

If you’re there say hi!

Mar 28

Publication day!

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The first book in my new YA series, The Change Trilogy, The Silent Invasion, is released today! If you’re in Australia you can pick up a copy from your favourite bricks and mortar bookseller, online retailers or on Kindle, iBooks or Kobo. Even better, for a limited time the print book is available for just $9.99 and the ebook for even less.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the book I’ve written a piece for the Guardian about the inspiration for the series; alternatively you can check out my interviews with the Dymocks and Booktopia podcasts. And if you’re in Sydney and you’re free on Thursday 27 April I’ll be in conversation with Garth Nix at Kinokuniya at 6:30pm.

And I hope you enjoy it – I’m so excited about it and the sequels, and thrilled they’re finally in the world where people can read them.

Mar 16

Writing on the Precipice: On Literature and Climate Change

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“Late last year, in the dying days of the American presidential campaign, the World Wildlife Fund published its most recent Living Planet Report. Published biennially, these reports have long made sobering reading, but 2016’s took that to a new level, declaring that between 1970 and 2012 close to 60 per cent of the world’s wildlife had disappeared, and that without concerted action that figure was projected to reach 67 per cent by 2020. In other words, humans were close to having wiped out more than two thirds of the world’s wildlife in just half a century.

“As somebody who has spent most of their adult life thinking and writing about animals and the environment, I found this story physically distressing. As with last summer’s bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef it felt like a tipping point, a moment when it had become clear we could not continue down the path we are on, a moment when things would have to change.

“In fact the world’s media greeted the story with a collective shrug. A few articles here and there mentioned it — and then it was gone, swamped by the drama of Donald Trump’s terrifying rise to power.

“It is difficult to know what to do in such circumstances. The climatologist James Hansen once said being a climate scientist was like screaming at people from behind a soundproof glass wall: being a writer concerned with these questions often feels frighteningly similar. Because although it is difficult to understand how one could not be writing about these questions, the ethical urgency one feels is tempered by a sense of the futility of the gesture in the face of such enormity, a feeling one’s tools are not fit for purpose. What is the point of stories in such a moment, one wants to ask. How can one poem or one song or one novel make a difference?” Read more at Sydney Review of Books

Mar 7

Preorder The Silent Invasion for just $6.99!

Silent_Invasion_twitter.jpgThe Silent Invasion hits bookshops in three weeks, but for a limited time Australian readers can preorder the ebook from iBooks for just $6.99 and the print book from Booktopia for just $7.95.

Even better, you can read the first four chapters for free right now on iBooks.

So why are you waiting? Alien biology! Metamorphosis! The beginning of the end of the world! Grab a copy now!

Jan 31

Born to Run

I’ve been listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen lately, and thinking about his body of work and my relationship with it. As you’d expect with an artist whose career spans more than 40 years there are highs and lows, but unusually for somebody who works in rock and roll and pop, there’s also a surprising degree of consistency, and there are albums he’s recorded in the past couple of decades (I’m thinking of Magic and The Rising in particular) which I listen to as often and enjoy just as much as the albums from the 1970s and 1980s.

But the album I love best and return to most often is Born to Run. I’ve been listening to it for 35 years and I still get chills every time. I love the scale of it, the Spectorish Wall of Sound grandeur of its production and the sense it’s in conversation with so many of his influences in 1960s pop and soul (“Roy Orbison sang ‘For the Lonely’ …”), the extraordinary sax and the way it underlines how essential Clemons was, the beautiful piano on ‘Backstreets’ and ‘Jungleland’, the deliberate yet unself-conscious sweep of the songs and the economy of the storytelling (‘Meeting Across The River’ or ‘Backstreets’, for instance). In his memoir Springsteen says “I wanted to craft a record that sounded like the last record on Earth, like the last record you might hear… the last one you’d ever NEED to hear. One glorious noise … then the apocalypse. From Elvis came the record’s physical thrust; Dylan, of course, threaded through the imagery of not just writing about SOMETHING but writing about EVERYTHING.”, but although that urgency and desire for liberation through movement is what gives the record its extraordinary power, part of what I’ve always loved about it is the fact that even in its dark moments there’s a joyfulness to it that’s largely stripped away on Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska. Interestingly I also often end up listening to it back to back with Patti Smith’s Horses, which I don’t think is coincidental, not just because both albums were released in 1975 (or because Springsteen wrote ‘Because the Night’ for Smith, apparently singing it down the phone in the middle of the night as he went), but because when you listen to them side by side you hear how much both are about the striving for a sort of transcendence and purity of feeling, both qualities that have become unfashionable in recent years. It’s an astonishing record, and one that only seems to get more remarkable with the passage of time.

Jan 29

Ghost Species

shell-219665_960_720It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the beach beside the steel gantries and fuel tanks of Botany Bay’s container terminal watching my kids build a sandcastle by the water’s edge, a structure that keeps collapsing because the waves keep hitting it. But what I can’t get out of my head is the section of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, I read this morning, in which an unnamed narrator offers an imaginary account of the first sudden sea level rise in the 2040s. It’s a possibility I’ve also imagined in Ghost Species, the adult novel I’m writing (although mine is done from a more personal, experiential perspective), but simultaneously it’s a scenario that no matter how difficult it is for us to comprehend is now pretty much assured even if we do get emissions under control (as Elizabeth Kolbert wrote recently, “once feedbacks take over, the climate can change quickly, and it can change radically … It’s likely that the “floodgates” are already open, and that large sections of Greenland and Antarctica are fated to melt. It’s just the ice in front of us that’s still frozen”). All of which means this beach, a lot of this city, most coastal habitats, mangroves and reefs and, I suspect, much of our world, are all already lost, swept away by the ocean, like the bathetically symbolic sandcastle my kids are trying to build against the backdrop of the engine of global trade. Is there a word for his prospective grief, this knowledge nothing here will remain? For all the species and ecosystems that still linger, although they are already lost? For the way I feel when I watch my kids, and know that however safe the world they inhabit seems the future holds dislocation and disaster, or for my own uncertainty about what I should be teaching them? In his book Orison for a Curlew the writer Horatio Clare talks about Greece’s economic ruin being a cenotaph for our society, I wonder whether this moment might be another.

Jan 18

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Cover Reveal: The Silent Invasion

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I’m incredibly excited to present the cover of my new novel, The Silent Invasion, which will be published by Pan Macmillan Australia in April. It’s the first part of a trilogy of young adult novels set a decade or so from now on an Earth transformed by the arrival of alien biology. I’m incredibly excited about them, and I’ve had huge fun writing them, not least because they’ve let me play around with a whole lot of crazy ideas about alien ecologies and replication and quantum hive minds, while also writing a really personal story about love and loyalty and survival. I’ll be posting more information about them closer to publication, but for now you can pre-order the first part from your favourite bookseller, and make a note in your diary that the second book will be available in November.

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