Childhood, Writing and the Natural World

Thu Oct 06 2022 at 11:30 am to 01:00 pm

Bradley Forum | Adelaide

Nature Festival
Publisher/HostNature Festival
Childhood, Writing and the Natural World
Advertisement
Three authors discuss writing, childhood and Australia’s natural world at this Auslan-interpreted event. Attend in-person or via Zoom.
About this Event

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

Join writers Danielle Clode and Inga Simpson in conversation about writing, childhood and the natural world, together with writer and UniSA academic Dr Jessica White. This event will be Auslan-interpreted and you can attend in person or via Zoom.

Children’s books, often written by women, have inspired our engagement with nature and created generations of passionate conservationists. Danielle Clode will talk about Dorothy Wall, the author of Blinky Bill and the campaign to save the koala from imminent extinction in the 1930s. Inga Simpson contemplates what it is to live and write close to nature post Black-Summer, through her process of reforesting a childhood place laden with family and colonial male legacies. She asks whether it is possible, given the weight of ecological grief upon us, to find and nurture our eco-self through relationship with a home patch, no matter how small.

A selection of the authors’ books will be available for purchase at this event. Attendance is free, but please RSVP whether attending in person or via Zoom.

Danielle Clode is a narrative nonfiction writer whose work includes nature-writing, essays, science-writing, historical fiction, science fiction and children’s books. Her books have won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and FAW award for non-fiction and the Whitley Award for popular zoology and been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia, Adelaide Festival and National Biography awards. She started science writing after completing her PhD in zoology at Oxford. She has worked as a full-time freelance writer for the last 20 years and is an associate professor in creative writing at Flinders University. Danielle’s recent books include biography/memoirs about two female scientists: naturalist Edith Coleman in The Wasp and the Orchid and collector Jeanne Barret In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World (Picador). Her latest book is a narrative natural history about koalas and will be published in Australia by Black Inc and in the US/UK by W. W. Norton.

Inga Simpson is the author of the novels The Last Woman in the World, Mr Wigg, Nest, Where the Trees Were, as well as Understory: my life with trees and, for children, The Book of Australian Trees, illustrated by Alicia Rogerson. Inga’s novels have been short and longlisted for numerous awards, including the Miles Franklin and Stella Prize, while Understory was shortlisted for the Adelaide Writers Week award for nonfiction. Inga has PhDs in creative writing and English literature, with her most recent thesis exploring the history of Australian nature writing. Her short stories and essays have been published in Wonderground, Chicago Quarterly Review, Griffith Review, Openbook, Review of Australian Fiction, Clues, Writing Queensland, and The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Her cricket novel, Willowman, will be released 26 October 2022.

Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the National Biography Award and two categories in the Queensland Literary Awards. Jessica has received funding from Arts Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts and has undertaken residencies and fellowships in Hobart, Rome and Munich. She is a 2022-23 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts and a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia.

This event is part of the speaker series curated by Dr Jessica White, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at UniSA; and supported by UniSA's Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) Research Centre and the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.


Event Photos
Event Photos
Advertisement

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Bradley Forum, Level 5 Hawke Building, Adelaide, Australia

Tickets

AUD 0.00

Sharing is Caring: