I recently had the honour of attending Newington College Litfest 2023 at the invitation of Ann Jagger and her unrivalled team of librarians and teachers. Over the course of three exciting days, I delivered eleven talks and workshops for hundreds …
Words seem cheap nowadays. They roll beneath our fingertips on social media feeds, via text messages, and on the news-sites and blogs we browse on trains and buses. First thing in the morning and last thing before sleep, we read. …
In a special two-part workshop at Santa Sabina in mid-2017, I had the honour of working with an incredible cohort of Year 10 English students. To begin, I delivered a one hour lecture that offered a brief overview of the …
Dystopian Fiction at Santa Sabina College 2017 Read more »
At the end of November 2016, I had the honour of visiting Penrith High School to meet Hellen Jiang and her classmates in Year Nine. Hellen won the senior division of the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge Words & Art Competition …
When I was in primary school, Book Week competed with Christmas and Easter as my favourite time of year. La Semana del Libro felt sacred to this child, for whom stories and story-telling were indeed a form of religious observance. …
I had the honour of attending the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards recently. It was a special pleasure for me, as my friend and guiding star Rebecca Young won the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature for her masterpiece, Teacup, illustrated …
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to a wonderful group of students from St George Girls High School and Kogarah High School in Sydney. I was there on the invitation of two fantastic teacher-librarians, Helen Lee and Gail Johnston. …
St George Girls High School & Kogarah High School Read more »
At the end of 2015, I had the honour of visiting International Grammar School in Sydney to address the Year Seven cohort about Empire of the Waves. It was an especially wonderful honour for me, invited as the guest of …
International Grammar School Sydney: School Visit Read more »
In something of a homecoming, I had the opportunity to speak at the Trinity Grammar School Preparatory School assembly about Empire of the Waves in mid-November. Since I wrote this novel as a kind of letter to my strange and …