Irma and Karen chat about the upcoming Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. 

Then Karen talks to Kylie Needham about how a short story turned into her debut novel, the joys and challenges of writing for television and the screen, the collaboration of the writers’ room and the vulnerabilities of the process, what writing scripts taught her about moving the narrative forward, whether authors should get involved with screen adaptions of their work, the inequality and sexism of television in the 2000s, and a beautiful moment with a literature high school teacher decades later.

About Kylie
Kylie Needham is an award-winning screenwriter. She has won two AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Awards for television scriptwriting, and her work has been published in several literary journals. Her first novel, Girl in a Pink Dress, published in 2023, won the MUD Literary Prize for the best debut literary novel by an Australian author, and also won the MARION Writers Prize for Fiction.