This week, join us on Podstreet as host Will Yeoman catches up with WA author Brendan Ritchie, whose latest novel Eta Draconis, winner of the prestigious 2022 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, has just been published by UWAP.

"Eta Draconis is a road novel set in a world besieged by a long and destructive meteor shower. The story follows two sisters as they journey from their small coastal town to the city ahead of the coming semester. The relationship between the sisters is fractured and fading. Turned upside down by the meteorites that arrived at the start of their adolescence and the strange world they have inhabited since. As the showering intensifies and their way forward becomes threatened, the sisters are forced to confront their problems and recalibrate their hopes for the future."

This manuscript was born out of my own road trips between home and university. Eight hours of silent, shifting landscape to ponder my place within the world as it finally began to open up in front of me. And out of an endless fascination with the universe - creation and destruction resting so vividly above.

Brendan Ritchie