Drum roll… our 2023 HNSA Conference will be held on 21-22 October at the Southern Sydney Event Centre at Hurstville, conveniently located close to Sydney Airport and Hurstville Station. Early bird tickets will go on sale in July.
Make sure you save the date!
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
We’ve decided to offer the best of both worlds by running a combined live and online event. Attendees can once again rub shoulders enjoying in person sessions while those who are constrained by geography can enjoy live streamed sessions with virtual tickets. Both live and virtual audiences will have on demand access to the entire program for 3 months after the conference ends. No more difficult choices across concurrent streams! You can attend everything in your own time – and watch sessions as often as you like.
We are looking forward to our community coming together again but the hybrid format also gives more authors a chance to appear. We’ll be able to bring you speakers from Western Australia to across The Ditch in New Zealand. Maybe even others from the further afield as we did in 2021.
We are excited to announce our guests of honour are Melissa Lucashenko, Anna Funder, Judy Nunn and Tom Keneally:
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published in 1997 and since then her work has received acclaim in many literary awards. Too Much Lip is her sixth novel and won the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance. It was also shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Stella Prize, two Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, two Queensland Literary Awards and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Melissa is a Walkley Award winner for her non-fiction, and a founding member of human rights organisation Sisters Inside. She writes about ordinary Australians and the extraordinary lives they lead. elissa Lucahshenko’s much anticipated next novel, Edenglassie, will be released in 2023. Set in 1850s Brisbane when it was called Edenglassie, and in contemporary times, this brilliant story boldly reclaims and reframes the colonial narrative.
ANNA FUNDER
Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland and All That I Am – both international bestsellers, published in more than twenty-six countries – and the novella The Girl with the Dogs.
Stasiland, hailed as a ‘classic’, tells true stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of others who worked for the Stasi. In 2004, Stasiland won the UK’s premier award for non-fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for many other awards.
Anna’s novel All That I Am is an homage to four German anti-Hitler activists living bravely but precariously in exile in London in the 1930s. All That I Am won many literary awards including Australia’s most prestigious, the Miles Franklin Prize, and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It spent over a year on the bestseller lists, was BBC Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime, and The Times Book of the Month. Her latest book Wifedom:Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, will be published in July 2023.
Originally trained as an international human rights lawyer, Anna is a former DAAD Fellow in Berlin, Australia Council Fellow, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. She lives in Sydney.
Tom KENEALLY
Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, later made into the Steven Spielberg Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List. His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel. His fiction includes Shame and the Captives, The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany’s Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award. The People’s Train was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia division. Tom won the 2022 ARA Historical Novel Prize for Corporal Hitler’s Pistol.
JUDY NUNN
Judy Nunn’s career has been long, illustrious and multifaceted. After combining her internationally successful acting career with scriptwriting for television and radio, Judy decided in the 90s to turn her hand to prose.
Her first three novels, The Glitter Game, Centre Stage and Araluen, set respectively in the worlds of television, theatre and film, became instant bestsellers, and the rest is history, quite literally in fact. She has since developed a love of writing Australian historically-based fiction and her fame as a novelist has spread rapidly throughout Europe where she has been published in English, German, French, Dutch, Czech and Spanish.
Her subsequent bestsellers, Kal, Beneath the Southern Cross, Territory, Pacific, Heritage, Floodtide, Maralinga, Tiger Men, Elianne, Spirits of the Ghan, Sanctuary, Khaki Town and Showtime! confirmed Judy’s position as one of Australia’s leading fiction writers. She has now sold over one million books in Australia alone.
In 2015 Judy was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her “significant service to the performing arts as a scriptwriter and actor of stage and screen, and to literature as an author”.
SAVE THE DATE of 21 -22 OCTOBER 2023 for yet another fabulous feast of historical fiction!
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