States of Mind
Ashley Hay + David Stavanger + Kathryn Heyman + Loki Liddle
slq Auditorium 2, level 2, State Library
L023
#Performances
#About the event
Duration: 60 minutes
How do the stories we tell influence the lives we lead and the lives we create through fiction, poetry and song? How do we bring the internal lives of characters to life – and how do the internal lives of those we know, and those we imagine, inspire and feed creative work? Loki Liddle, Kathryn Heyman and David Stavanger – all contributors to Griffith Review 72: States of Mind – join GR editor Ashley Hay to explore these ideas and more.
#Artists
Ashley Hay
Ashley Hay is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work includes The Railwayman’s Wife, A Hundred Small Lessons and Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions. A former editor of Griffith Review, she also works as a mentor and facilitator, and as editorial consultant for the Climate Justice Observatory.
David Stavanger
David Stavanger is a poet, producer, parent, and former psychologist living on Wodi Wodi Dharawal land. He also spends most of his week as an Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. David is the author of The Special (UQP), awarded the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize; and Case Notes (UWAP), which won the 2021 Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. He is the co-editor of SOLID AIR: Collected Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word (UQP, 2019) and Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (2022). David's new collection is The Drop Off (Upswell Publishing, 2025), which explores the liminal space of shared custody and societal tropes of the ‘broken family’.
Kathryn Heyman
Dr Kathryn Heyman is the author of the memoir, Fury, published in Australia and the UK in May 2021. Her previous novels include Storm and Grace and Floodline. Her work has won and been nominated for awards in Australia and the UK including the Scottish Writer of the Year Award, the Wingate, the West Australian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Orange Prize and the Arts Council of England Writers Awards.
As founder of the Australian Writers Mentoring Program, she has guided many writers from idea to publication, including many award-winners. She received the 2017 Copyright Agency Author Fellowship for Fury and is an Honorary Professor of Humanities at the University of Newcastle. For full details see www.writermentors.com and www.kathrynheyman.com
Loki Liddle
Loki Liddle is a proud Jabirr Jabirr man and a passionate poet, musician and Creative Producer for Digi Youth Arts. Perhaps more accurately referred to as a playful storyteller and a bit of a strange child with a will to be weird and a way to be made.
