The Skin I Am In

Thu 5 May 2022

slq Auditorium 1, level 2, State Library

Main Festival

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

In this ambitious and brilliant book, Skin Deep, author and historian Phillipa McGuinness writes about our largest organ, our outer shell, and its relation to our inner selves. What has the biology of skin to do with race? (Hint: not a lot.) What is the erotic power of touch? And the propulsion of violence? How do we communicate through our skin? Skin Deep explores the social, political and cultural ideas of skin.

Phillipa McGuiness in conversation with Christine Jackman

#Artists

Phillipa McGuinness

Phillipa McGuinness is the editor of Openbook, the magazine of the State Library of NSW. She is co-editor of The Library That Made Me: 200 Years of the State Library of NSW (2026), and the author of The Year Everything Changed — 2001 (2018) and Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves (2022).

Christine Jackman

Christine Jackman is an author, strategic communications adviser and former journalist. She is the author of two non-fiction books, Inside Kevin07 and Turning Down the Noise. Her journalism career took her from a Brisbane newspaper cadetship to the Federal Press Gallery and a posting as a foreign correspondent in New York. A 2026 Varuna Fellow, Christine is currently writing her first novel, Power Play, a contemporary psychological suspense set in Australian politics.