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 ...

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? Labyri...

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 d...

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 str...

Wayne Marshall is a writer and musician.  His stories have appeared in Going Down Swinging, Island, Review of Australia Fiction and elsewhere.  He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award. Wayne will be reading from his short story collection Shirl 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 ex pect from the piece you have chosen?  I’m still deciding which story from Shirl to read, but most likely it’ll be something comic. So: either an alien invasion that leads to a ban on Australian Rules football; a lonely Yowie that leaves the bush to attend a Desperate and Dateless ball; or the unveiling of a striking new girlfriend by a man named Geoff. That kind of thing? 2. How would you describe your writing? It’s a bit of a dirty word in literary circles, but I see myself first and foremost as an entertainer. Humour, adventure, twists and turns, crazy goin...

J.M. Green is a crime writer based in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Her debut novel,  Good Money , the first hardboiled-crime novel featuring Stella Hardy, was shortlisted for a 2016 Ned Kelly Award, the Sisters in Crime's Davitt Award for best debut, as well as the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. She divides her time between writing in her backyard studio and working as a librarian.  Shoot Through  is the third in the Stella Hardy series, following  Too Easy . J.M. Green will be reading from Shoot Through at First Chapters on Friday 1 November .   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 a conversation between my accidental detective, social worker Stella Hardy, and her long time frenemy Marcus Pugh, minster for justice. Marcus must ask for Stella’s help, something he is uncomfortable do...

Meg Mundell is a writer and academic.  The Trespassers  (UQP, August 2019) is her second novel.  Black Glass  (2011) is Meg’s critically acclaimed first novel, and  Things I Did for Money  (2013) is her debut short story collection. Past day jobs include freelance journalist, policy analyst, nightclub DJ, ventriloquist’s assistant, and deputy editor of The Big Issue Australia .  Meg holds a PhD in creative writing and a BA in psychology and philosophy, and her academic research focuses on place, spatial justice, and narratives of homelessness. Meg also runs the project WeAre Here , which uses creative writing to explore understandings of place with people who have experienced homelessness (www.homelesswriting.org). Meg will be reading from The Trespasser s at First Chapters on Friday 1 November. 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 chos...