Kate Mildenhall and Astrid Edwards recorded this session 'The Hummingbird Effect' LIVE at Canberra Writers Festival in August 2023.

Kate's debut novel, Skylarking, was longlisted for Debut Fiction in The Indie Book Awards 2017 and the 2017 Voss Literary Award, and her bestselling The Mother Fault was longlisted for the 2021 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year and shortlisted for the 2020 Aurealis Awards. The Hummingbird Effect is her third novel. Kate also teaches creative writing and co-hosts The First Time podcast.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

Thanks to Canberra Writers Festival

This recording took place at 2:30pm on Saturday 19 August at Kambri Cultural Centre (ANU), and thanks go to the phenomenal team at Canberra Writers Festival for sharing this audio with us.

If you are interested in running festivals, judging prizes and writing reviews, we recommend this interview with Beejay Silcox, Judge of The Stella Prize and Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

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Erin Riley is a social worker, and has spent most of the last decade working alongside marginalised populations in community aged care. Erin is also a writer, and their A Real Piece of Work is their debut memoir and collection of essays.

Erin brings a queer lived experience to their professional work and to their writing. They were a Penguin Random House Australia Write It fellow in 2021, and have been published in Kill Your Darlings, Bent Street and various corners of the internet. 

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland (2002) and All That I Am (2012). Her third major work, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life (2023) interrogates the historical record to uncover Eileen O'Shaunessy, the wife of George Orwell, and her influence on his writing.

Her books have won multiple literary awards: Stasiland received the the Samuel Johnson Prize (the UK's premier award for non-fiction and All That I Am the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Originally trained as an international human rights lawyer, Anna is a former DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Australia Council Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. 

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Briohny Doyle writes extraordinary fiction. Echolalia was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2021, and in 2023 she released Why We Are Here.

Briohny is a lecturer in creative writing at The University of Sydney and a former Fulbright scholar, and her writing also appears in The Monthly, The Guardian, Meanjin, The Griffith Review, and The Age.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Beejay Silcox is a writer and literary critic, and also the Artistic Director of the Canberra Writers Festival.

Her literary criticism and cultural commentary regularly appears in national arts publications, and is increasingly finding an international audience, including in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The New York Times. 

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the memoir The Hate Race and the poetry collections Carrying the World and How Decent Folk Behave. Her children's picture books include the CBCA Honour book The Patchwork Bike and the illustrated poem When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. In 2023 she is Poet in Residence at The University of Melbourne.

Maxine has appeared on The Garret before, and you can listen to her most recent interview here.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sally Young is professor of political science at the University of Melbourne. Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires (2023) interrogates the history of Australia's media dynasties and the move from newspaper print to radio and TV and the online world.

She is the author of six previous books on Australian politics and media, including the award-winning Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia's Newspaper Empires, which Media Monsters follows on from. Her other works include How Australia Decides, Shooting the Picture (with Fay Anderson) and The Persuaders.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kate Larsen is a writer, arts and cultural consultant currently based on Kaurna Yerta in Tamtanya/Adelaide. As one of Australia’s best-known social media poets, her alter ego Katie Keys (aka @tinylittlepoems) wrote and posted a daily poem for over a decade. Her first printed collection, Public. Open. Space, was released in 2023.

Kate’s work has been published or commissioned by The Relationship is the Project, Meanjin, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Voice & Verse and anthologies, magazines and arts organisations across Australia, Asia and the United Kingdom.

In this interview Kate discusses her 2023 essay in Overland, 'Tears for Peers: the hidden costs of Arts funding'.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Isabelle Oderberg is a journalist with two decades of experience across Europe, Asia and Australia. Her first book, Hard to Bear, addresses a gap in the market and demonstrates it is possible to write about an experience some dismiss as unpalatable.

Isabelle mentions her agent Melanie Ostell, and Melanie has appeared on The Garret before to discuss what a literary agent does.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sarah Krasnostein is the multi-award winning author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer and the Quarterly Essay Not Waving, Drowning.  A regular contributor to The Monthly and The Saturday Paper, she was awarded the 2022 Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. Her latest work, On Peter Carey, was released in 2023.

Sarah previously appeared on The Garret with Jess Hill discussing writing their Quarterly Essays.

Read the transcript for this interview here. 

About The Garret

Follow The Garret: Writing and Publishing and our host Astrid Edwards on Instagram.

Explore our back catalogue (and transcripts) at thegarretpodcast.com.

Support the show: https://linktr.ee/garretpodcast

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.