Public Intimacies – Writing About Family

Sun 8 Sep 2019

Karen Foxlee

Auditorium 2, State Library of Queensland

Panel

8114

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

Fiction can explore the intimate push and pull of family life like no other form. Three authors discuss how they portray the complexity of families in their work and where their fictional families come from.

#Artist

Karen Foxlee

Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who writes for both kids and young-adults. She grew up in the Australia outback mining town Mount Isa and still frequently dreams she is walking barefoot along the dry Leichhardt River. One of four children she started telling stories when she was young. She filled countless small exercise books with sweeping sagas of orphaned girls illustrated with pictures cut from the back of Readers Digest magazines. Her award-winning novels include The Anatomy of Wings, The Midnight Dress, Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy and A Most Magical Girl. Her latest story for all ages is Lenny’s Book of Everything. It recently won the Children’s Book of the Year Indie Award. Karen lives in South East Queensland with her daughter and several animals, including two wicked parrots who frequently eat parts of her laptop when she isn’t looking. Her passions are her daughter, writing, day-dreaming, baking, running and swimming in the sea.

#Moderator

Frances Whiting

Frances Whiting is one of Australia's best known and respected writers. As national senior feature writer for News Magazines, she has won many journalism awards, including the Clarions Outstanding Contribution to Journalism prize in 2023. Frances has a national column in News Limited weekend magazines, and a weekly column which — at 28 years — is Australia's longest running Sunday column. She has written two best sellers, Walking on Trampolines and The Best Kind of Beautiful, as well as two collections of her much loved columns, Oh To Be a Marching Girl, and That's a Home Run Tiger.