Brunswick Bound Books

Lisa Gorton has a PhD on the poety of John Donne from the University of Oxford.  She is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer.  Her first poetry collection, Press Release , won the Victoria Premier's Award for Poetry; he second, Hotel Hyperion , was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.  Lisa's novel, The Life of Houses , was the co-winner of the 2016 Prime Minister's Award for Fiction. Lisa will be reading from her recent collection of poetry, Empirical , for us at First Chapters on Friday 6 March. 1. Brunswick Bound has asked you to read a piece from your published work.  Tell us what we can expect from the piece you have chosen? I'll read something from my most recent poetry collection Empirical .  It's a book about place, memory and empire and its first sequence is set in Royal Park. 2. How would you describe your writing? As a reader's writing. 3. What was the first book that you read (or had read to you) that left a

Nick Gadd is a novelist and essayist.  His first novel Ghostlines won a Victoria Premier's Literary Award and a Ned Kelly Award.  Nick's essays and articles have apeared in Meanjin , Griffith Review , Kill Your Darlings , Elsewhere: A Journal of Place , The Guardian and in several anthologies. Nick will be reading at First Chapters on Friday 6 March from his new novel Death of a Typographer . 1. Brunswick Bound has asked you  to read a piece from your published work.  Tell us what we can expect from the piece you have chosen? I’m reading part of the opening chapter of Death of a Typographer , in which the reader first encounters my co-investigators when they meet each other at a murder scene. Martin Kern has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. Lucy Tan is a hard-working journalist with a punctuation fetish and eyebrows like swung dashes. In this chapter you will hear the first of many references to fonts, and

Brunswickians took the following ten books to heart last year.  They read them, raved about them and bought them for friends.  It really was wonderful and reaffirming to see how much love for stories and ideas there was in the 'hood in 2019.  Let's hope all that keeps us in good stead for the troubling days ahead. In contrast to 2018, we had a huge resurgence in sales for Fiction - and even more interesting, all but one of those ( Normal People by Sally Rooney) was written by an Australian author .  Love this!  So great to see local authors Angela Savage ( Mother of Pearl ) and Christos Tsiolkas ( Damascus ) there in the mix. It was no surprise that Dark Emu was our bestselling book of the year.  This book is starting conversations that are being continued by books such as Sand Talk , The Yield , Songspirals and Welcome to Country - all indigenous titles that appeared in our Top 25 for the year.  And we can't wait to see even more indigenous voices being publishe

Alex Landragin is a French-Armenian-Australian writer.  Now a freelance author, he is a former writer of Lonely Planet travel guides in Australia, Europe and Africa, and his writing has appeared in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Los Angeles Review of Books.  He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne and is a past recipient of an Australia Council Emerging Writers Grant. Alex will be reading at First Chapters on Friday 7 February from his debut novel Crossings . 1. Brunswick Bound has asked you to read a piece from your published work. Tell us what we can expect from the piece you have chosen? Crossings is about two characters who can ‘cross’ from one body into another. Sometimes those crossings are a little, shall we say, underhand. I’ll be reading a description of my favourite of those crossings scenes, where the narrator tricks a morose young man into the undertaking. 2. How would you describe your writing? Labyrinthine, s

Amy Bodossian is a critically acclaimed cabaret performer, comedian and poet who has been captivating audiences with her eccentric and unforgettable work.  Her career began in her hometown Adelaide where she was nothing short of a spoken word icon - her raw, poignant, and often absurd style of performance poetry becoming a favourite amongst Adelaide audiences.  She has won the SA Young Women Writes' Poetry Award and been on ABCs Spicks and Specks and Please Like Me , and performed sell out shows to audiences across Australia. Amy will be reading from her first book of poetry Wide Open , at First Chapters on Friday 7 February. 1. Brunswick Bound has asked you to read a piece from your published work.  Tell us what we can expect from the piece you have chosen? In Wide Open I dive into the oceans of my romantic escapades. The three poems I've chosen represent three different stages of some of these. The first is a pretty humorous exploration of sexual tension during

Ender Baskan is the author of the novel A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man published by Vre Books.  His work revolves around the condition of the contemporary psychosphere.  Poetics, revolution and the Australian Dream are some of his prime obsessions.  He is currently writing postcards.  Ender is the recipient of the 2014/15 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Prose.   Ender will be reading from A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man at First Chapters on Friday 7 February.   1. Brunswick Bound has asked you to read a piece from your published work.  Tell us what we can expect from the piece you have chosen? The piece is from my novel A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man . It is fiction but its not a novel in the classic sense. What starts off as a road novel turns into a meditation on the question of how can we be in Australia. The narrative is like a rocket on the space shuttle, I need just enough of it to get through the stratosphere, and from there I want to break do