The Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Sun 8 Sep 2019

Melanie Cheng + Amanda O'Callaghan + Tabitha Bird

Cinema B, GoMA

Panel

8123

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

These authors capture everyday people and events in all their beauty and reflect back to us what is special in breathtaking prose, art and form. Watch out, they’re probably spying on us in those moments when we’re most being ourselves.

#Artists

Melanie Cheng

Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. Of Chinese-Australian heritage, she was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her short story collection Australia Day won the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Indie Book Award for debut fiction and the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. Room for a Stranger is her second book.

Amanda O'Callaghan

Amanda O'Callaghan is a Brisbane-based author whose short stories and flash fiction have been published and won awards in Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Her work has been awarded and shortlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Flash 500, Carmel Bird Award, Aeon Award, Bristol Short Story Prize and Fish Short Story Prize.
A former advertising executive, Amanda holds English degrees from King's College London, and a PhD for the University of Queensland. In 2016 she was a recipient of a Queensland Writers Fellowship. THIS TASTE FOR SILENCE is her debut collection.

Tabitha Bird

Tabitha Bird is a writer and poet who lives and works in the rural township of Boonah, Queensland. By day Tabitha may be found painting, working on her next book or with her husband, three beautiful boys and Chihuahua. Her debut novel A Lifetime of Impossible Days was published in June 2019 by Penguin Random House.

#Moderator

Robyn Ravlich

Robyn Ravlich is a writer and award-winning broadcaster. She is the author of Skywriting: making radiowaves, a personal reflection on radio and Australian cultural history during her career as a celebrated, creative broadcaster on Radio National and Classic FM – from the 1970s to the advent of podcasting.

Robyn was born in Broken Hill and joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1975. During a celebrated ABC radio career spanning more than three decades Robyn Ravlich produced and presented a range of unique radio works, rich in ideas and sound. She was recognised with international and national awards for her distinctive, poetic approach to radio feature productions for The Listening Room, Into the Music, Earshot and other innovative programs.

She has received multiple awards at the New York Radio Festival and her incisive, dramatic radio documentary about asylum seekers, On the Raft, All at Sea, received the 2002 Australian Human Rights & Equal Opportunities Commission Radio Award and the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize for Radio. Now retired, Robyn continues to produce radio features as a freelancer, also writing creative non-fiction.