Heroines Festival Book Month Program

Lauren Chater’s second novel, Gulliver’s
Wife, was published in April 2020 to
rave reviews: “Innovative and unique,
this novel was gripping from the very
first page” (Theresa Smith Writes, 2020).
Lauren revisits the classic Gulliver’s Travels
to explore Mary Burton Gulliver. Mary
is a fleeting and limited character in the
original but is reimagined with a voice
and life of her own. Gulliver’s Wife is an
eloquent feat that tackles the historical
underwriting of women’s stories.
Cat Sparks, a multi-award winning
Australian author, editor, artist, and
director of multiple speculative fiction
festivals, completed her PhD in creative
writing entitled Capitalocene Dreams: Dark
Tales of Near Futures & The 21st Century
Catastrophe: Hyper-capitalism and Severe
Climate Change in Science Fiction. Her
forthcoming projects include publications
in the 2020 Dark Harvest anthology and
Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 3.
Kerry Turner published her second
historical fiction novel The Daughter of
Victory Lights in January 2020. Karen
Brooks, author of The Locksmiths
Daughter, describes the novel as “an
exquisite, heart-aching tale of love, loss,
rejection and connection all set against the
backdrop of firstly, London during the Blitz
and, later, the post-war years and early
sixties”.
2019 Festival guest Monica Tan’s Stranger
Country won the Chief Ministers Book
Award for Non-Fiction and Jessica White’s
Hearing Maud was shortlisted for the
National Biography Award by the State
Library of NSW.
Robyn Cadwallader appeared on
the “Hearing Our Grandmother’s
Voices” panel at Heroine Festival in
2019. Described by Head of Fiction at
HarperCollins, Catherine Milne, as a
“moving and profoundly beautiful novel
of the human impulse towards creativity
and connection”, her second novel, Book
of Colours went on to be the winner of the
2019 ACT Book of the Year.
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