Sisters in Crime member, Jess Byrne, is currently doing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. It includes a 20,000 word exegesis which she has chosen to write on Sisters in Crime’s Davitt Awards. (Jess is is pictured here with 2017 Davitt Award winner, Jane Harper.) Here is the paper she presented …
Melbourne author, Kirsty Ferguson, spoke to Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President about her newly launched novel, What Lies Beneath Us (Elephant Tree Publishing, 2019). Kirsty, you preface your novel with a trigger warning, so I’m going to do the same here. This Q&A includes discussion of infants at risk, infant death, and depression suffered by women …
Sisters in Crime is thrilled to discover that Geelong Cemeteries Trust has created a unique walking tour of the Geelong Eastern Cemetery, called History Alive, which features Ellen Davitt, author of Australia’s first full-length mystery novel, Force and Fraud, in 1865. Visitors are guided around by actors playing the parts of ‘residents’ of the cemetery, …
Robyn Walton, Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, spoke to Sydney author, Laura Elizabeth Woollett, about her book Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018) which has just been longlisted for the 2019 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal. Hi Laura. You give your readers a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of the Peoples Temple cult, which ended with …
Sisters in Crime Australia’s 19th Davitt Awards for the best crime and mystery books by Australian women are now open. The deadline has been extended so publishers now have until Friday 10 May to enter. Self-published books are again eligible. Six Davitt Awards will be presented at a gala dinner in Melbourne, probably in late …
New Zealand is a country of firsts, and Rotorua Noir was its debut crime fiction convention, held over the Australia Day weekend, 2019. The venue, appropriately the Shambles Theatre, was small, but a perfect confab resulted. Writers appeared from NZ, but also Australia (Michael Rowbotham), Iceland, Finland and the North of the British Isles. Rotorua …
‘You’re in love with love,’ my mother told me once. I must have been all of fourteen: flat-chested, grinning in shiny braces, complete with frightening, jutting headgear I wore at night. I went to girls’ school and I had no brothers. No men in the house at all. When my mother said that, about being …
Robyn Walton, Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, spoke to long-term member, Sandi Wallace, about her latest rural crime novel, Into the Fog (Taut Press, 2018). Sandi, congratulations on the third novel in your Georgie Harvey and John Franklin series. For your setting you chose the Dandenong Ranges, about an hour’s drive east of Melbourne CBD. And …
Robyn Walton. Sisters in Crime’s Vice-President, spoke to Perth author Leigh Straw about her latest book, Lillian Armfield: How Australia’s First Female Detective took on Tilly Devine and the Razor Gangs and Changed the Face of the Force (Hachette, 2018) Hi, Leigh. Most Australians would not be able to name this country’s first woman police …
Philomena Horsley (Northcote, Vic), a medical anthropologist who specialises in autopsies, took out the 25th Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Award presented on Saturday night (24 November). Actor Kate Atkinson and author Cate Kennedy presented the awards before a hundred crime fans at a gala ceremony at Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre. “It was a night of magic and …