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Home / Events / Festivals / Fact/Fiction Conversation: Melanie Cheng & Nicola Redhouse

Fact/Fiction Conversation: Melanie Cheng & Nicola Redhouse

Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Event Date: 21 September 2019
Author / Presenters: Melanie Cheng & Nicola Redhouse

This event is part of the 11th Annual Booklovers Festival

Two authors use the motif of the ‘ordinary’ (the ordinary lives of ordinary people) and create two very different responses. Award-winning fiction author Melanie Cheng created Room for a Stranger to explore everyday experiences of loneliness and compassion while author and editor Nicola Redhouse, examined her own experiences with mental health, particularly post‐natal depression, creating Unlike the heart: a memoir of brain and mind that is part‐memoir, part‐exploration of psycho‐analysis. What compels these authors to write about these experiences and how do they approach these topics?

About the Fact/Fiction Conversation Series:
What is at the heart of a story? At what point does fiction cross the border of truth? These questions are at the centre of the relationship between reader and creator and is the cornerstone of curiosity.

Fact/Fiction Conversations pair a fiction and non‐fiction writer together to discuss everything from their books and their writing processes to their influences and the ways in which their genres are more like twins than distant cousins. We have a series of Fact/Fiction conversations throughout the festival.

About the Authors:

Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner. She was born in Adelaide, grew up in Hong Kong and now lives in Melbourne. Her debut short story collection, Australia Day won Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, 2018; Longlisted for Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction 2018; Longlisted, ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2018; Longlisted, ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year 2018; Longlisted, Dobbie Literary Award for a first time published author, 2018; Shortlisted, Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, 2017; and the Winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, 2016. Room for a Stranger is her debut novel.

Nicola Redhouse is a writer and book editor, living in Melbourne, Australia. Her debut nonfiction book Unlike the Heart: a memoir of brain and mind was published in March 2019 and she has been published widely, writing on topics ranging from postnatal medication to the conundrum of objective measurement in mental health, in publications including the Australian, The Monthly, Meanjin literary journal and Women’s Agenda. Nicola’s fiction has been published in the literary journals Meanjin, Island and Kill Your Darlings, and in the anthologies Best Australian Stories and the Big Issue Fiction Special.

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