Chaired by Cath Kenneally.

Dual Miles Franklin Award-winner Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters tells the stories of two immigrant Australians, both of Asian heritage: Lili, a 22-year-old in 1980s France, and Lyle, living in a near future semi-dystopian Australia ravaged by bushfires, intolerance and capitalism. Set in the past and the future, Scary Monsters is a supremely contemporary novel, with a sharp dark humour that belies the seriousness of the themes it explores, and an audacious reversible format that acts as a playful physical embodiment of the migrant’s disorientation.