TUESDAY 22 OCTOBER | INSTORE EVENT
6pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins
Join us for a panel discussion between Ellen van Neerven, Mykaela Saunders, Melanie Saward and Rhianna Patrick for the book Shapeshifting.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Shapeshifting, co-edited by Jeanine Leane and Ellen van Neerven, is a wide-ranging collection of nonfiction by First Nations writers that breaks new ground. These lyric essays push the boundaries of nonfiction beyond the biographical or the academic, with pieces that experiment with form and embark on carefully crafting and re-crafting interventions that both challenge and expand existing genre structures.
Shapeshifting brings to the fore a whole new genre waiting to take shape, to be formed, informed and re-formed by First Nations Australian writers. Contributors include Charmaine Papertalk Green, Jim Everett, Jenni Martiniello, Natalie Harkin, Mykaela Saunders, Daniel Browning, Evelyn Araluen, Alison Whittaker, Rhianna Patrick, Melanie Saward, Timmah Ball and Hugo Comisari.
ABOUT THE PANEL
Ellen van Neerven (they/them) is an award-winning author, editor and educator of Mununjali and Dutch heritage. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light (UQP, 2014), a novel-in-stories, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. Their first poetry collection, Comfort Food (UQP, 2016), won the Tina Kane Emergent Award and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Throat (UQP, 2020) was the recipient of the Book of the Year, the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the Multicultural Award at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and won the inaugural Quentin Bryce Award. Personal Score: Sport. Culture. Identity (UQP, 2023), a book that weaves history, memoir, journalism and poetry, received the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Ellen is also the editor of the collections Homeland Calling (Desert Pea Media, 2020), Flock (UQP, 2021) and Unlimited Futures (Fremantle Press, 2022, co-edited with Rafeif Ismail).
Rhianna Patrick is a Torres Strait Islander journalist and broadcaster with over twenty-five years’ experience.
Dr Mykaela Saunders is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, teacher and researcher. They are the editor of This All Come Back Now, the Aurealis Award–winning, world-first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP, 2022), and the author of Always Will Be (UQP, 2024), which won the 2022 David Unaipon Award. Mykaela’s novel manuscript Last Rites of Spring was also shortlisted for the Unaipon Award in 2020, and received a Next Chapter Fellowship in 2021. Mykaela has won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Indigenous Poetry Prize, the National Indigenous Story Award, the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize for creative non-fiction and the University of Sydney’s Sister Alison Bush Graduate Medal for Indigenous research. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community through her Bundjalung and South Sea Islander family. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and at the tertiary level since 2012. They are currently an Indigenous postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University, researching First Nations speculative fiction.
Melanie Saward is a proud Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman. She is a writer, editor and academic based in Tulmur (Ipswich), Queensland. Her debut novel, Burn, was published by Affirm Press in 2023 and her first romantic comedy novel, Love Unleashed, in 2024 by Penguin Random House.
