Chaired by Michael Williams

In Christos Tsiolkas’s first foray into autofiction, 7½, his protagonist Christos declares he is tired of the lofty ambitions many novelists hold for their writing on politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality or the future. “All of them now bore me,” he declares. Instead, he will write about beauty. His powerful memories of the past, the strange present in which he tries to write – surrounded by the magnificently evoked natural world – and the novel on which he embarks are masterfully woven together into one compelling whole.