
Event #97
Short but Not Sweet
Mariana Enríquez + Ingrid Horrocks + Alex Cothren + Gillian Hagenus + Terri-Jane Dow
Fairfax Studio
Regular Program
#About the event
Duration: 60 minutes
Short but Not Sweet
Mariana Enríquez (A Sunny Place for Shady People), Ingrid Horrocks (All Her Lives), Alex Cothren (Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere), Gillian Hagenus (Common Places).
Chair: Terri-Jane Dow
11am–12pm, Sunday 11 October, Fairfax Studio
A haunted pokie machine. A vengeful dress. A neighbour who knows too much. A series of choices that reverberate across centuries. In these deliciously subversive and striking short story collections, desire, rebellion and anxiety illuminate the contours of our lives and remake reality in the most unexpected and narratively satisfying of ways.




#Artists
Mariana Enríquez
Mariana Enriquez was born in Argentina in 1973. She is the author of the novel Our Share of Night and the collections of short fiction, Things We Lost in Fire, A Sunny Place or Shady People and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Her most recent book is the travelogue Somebody is walking on your grave.
Ingrid Horrocks
Ingrid Horrocks is the author of the memoir Where We Swim, a literary history, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in Lithub, The Ninth Letter, The Sydney Review of Books, The Spinoff, Landfall, and the Guardian. She completed a PhD at Princeton and teaches for the Faber Writing Academy. In 2024, Ingrid was the Creative NZ Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, and in 2025 she was an International Exchange resident at Varuna National Writers House. All Her Lives was the winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Ingrid lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, with her partner and twin daughters. All Her Lives is her first book of fiction.
Alex Cothren
Alex Cothren is a lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University, on Kaurna Yerta. He has won the Carmel Bird, Griffith Review Emerging Voices and Peter Carey awards for short fiction. His story collection, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere, is out through Pink Shorts Press.
Gillian Hagenus
Gillian Hagenus is a writer and researcher living and working in Meanjin, Brisbane. Gillian specialises in (obsesses over) Australian Suburban Gothic fiction and is a current PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. Her debut short story collection Common Places was published in 2026 by UQP.
Terri-Jane Dow
Terri-Jane is a reader and writer, and the owner of independent bookshop, Cursive Knives.
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