In 2015, I was well and truly sick of my book. The History of Mischief had been lingering with me since 2006, and progress was slow. It was often left for months, only for me to return to it, tinker a bit, and then abandon it for another lengthy period of time. I needed something to keep me on track. I needed to be accountable to someone other than myself.
For Yuot A. Alaak, stories were a way of distracting himself from the fear of enemy attack, starvation and hardship, and to keep hope alive. In this episode, Yuot discusses his City of Fremantle Hungerford Award shortlisted memoir, Father of the Lost Boys, which tells the story of his family, especially his father, Mecak Ajang Alaak who, on a four-year journey, led 20,000 lost boys to safety during the Second Sudanese Civil War.
For anyone who thinks writing a picture book is easier than writing a novel, picture book creator Kelly Canby suggests you first write that novel, then condense it into 500 words without undermining its meaning or leaving out key plot points. Then get your pen and ink out and draw the illustrations as well!
Jon Doust's debut book for adults, Boy on a Wire, was Publisher Georgia Richter's first editorial job for Fremantle Press. In this episode, Georgia and Jon talk to host Rebecca Higgie about the crucial elements of the editor–author relationship, the foremost being trust, another being laughter.
When Rebecca Higgie won the inaugural Fogarty Literary award, she received $20,000 and a publishing contract with Fremantle Press, which she says, after working on her book for 12 years, was a dream come true. What she didn’t realise was that the work had only just begun.
Bron Bateman says she makes sense of the world through writing. She is an observer of her own life, absorbing every experience with all senses so she can articulate it in poetry. She’s also the ideal interviewee. She wants to answer every question put to her, no matter how difficult, because, she says, it’s only by doing this that we can truly reach each other as writers and as humans. In this podcast, we talk to Bron about her writing process in relation to her new poetry collection, Of Memory and Furniture.
It seems like only yesterday we were congratulating Holden Sheppard for winning the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. Now we’ve already had to reprint his wonderful debut novel Invisible Boys after stock flew off the shelves in the first week of release.
Como resident Rebecca Higgie won the inaugural Fogarty Literary Award for her manuscript The History of Mischiefat a special ceremony at the ECU Spiegeltent on Wednesday 22 May 2019. Chosen from a field of 64 manuscripts by Western Australian writers aged 18 to 35, Higgie won a $20,000 cash prize from the Fogarty Foundation and secured a publishing contract with Fremantle Press.
