Produced in collaboration with Griffith Review, Sarah Sentilles talks with Ashley Hay about her latest works. They discuss her essay, ‘Creation Stories’, from Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia! as well as Sarah’s new memoir Stranger Care. 

In this insightful discussion, Ashley and Sarah discuss many topics, including the collision between bureaucracy and love, the nature of creativity and the ability of art to change the way we see the world.

About Stranger Care: 
The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn — about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin.

About Creation Stories:
An essay about the world-making power of art. Published in Griffith Review 73: Hey Utopia!

Stranger Care: Sarah Sentilles in conversation with Ashley Hay

One of Australia’s best-loved broadcasters, Richard Fidler takes us into the world of medieval wanderers who wrote of their travels to the edges of the known world during Islam's fabled Golden Age.

In conversation with Kári Gíslason.

The Book Of Roads And Kingdoms

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is a luminous, compelling and utterly surprising memoir by Heather Rose, the bestselling author of Stella Prize-winner The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny. Heartbreaking and beautiful, this is a love story brimming with courage and joy against all odds, one that will bring wonder, light and comfort to all who read it.

Heather Rose in conversation with Jill Eddington.

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

Investigative journalist, Anke Richter, discusses how she immersed herself in the wild world of cults around the globe, exposing the ways they attract, entrap and destroy otherwise ordinary people.

Anke Richter in conversation with Zacharey Jane.

Cult Trip

We are surrounded by death in news, true-crime podcasts and even nursery rhymes. Yet from an early age, we are told that death is to be feared. How can we know what we're so afraid of, if we don’t examine it?

Hayley Campbell in conversation with Kerry Sunderland.

All The Living And The Dead

Speculating about the future, interrogating the past and understanding through storytelling unite three writers. A historian and two novelists describe how their approaches to writing allow them to imagine – and reimagine – past, present and future.

Michelle Arrow, Grace Chan, Shankari Chandran with Phillipa McGuinness.

What If Everything We Imagine Comes True

Stories are passed down through the generations. Expectations are too. Three novelists whose writings reflect their diverse family backgrounds share how the stories they inherited inform their writing.

Shankari Chandran, Shirley Le, Peter Polites with Jemma Birrell.

The Family Spark

The science has long been there, but it will take imagination to win the world over to climate action. To authors who have reimagined songs and witchy tales discuss how fiction can spark the energy we need.

Eliza Henry-Jones, Mark Smith with Nell Schofield.

Green Imaginings

Silent quitting, climate quitting, goblin mode, human sustainability, leaning out. What are all these terms and what age are we living in? How is language evolving to describe how we live now and what do all those catch-phrases mean? 

Ellen van Neerven, Alison Pennington, Kristine Ziwica and Paul Barclay.

Checking Out

Byron Writers Festival is a not-for-profit, member-based organisation offering a year-round program of workshops, seminars and events for writers and readers. Our annual festival, held in August, is the largest regional Writers Festival in Australia.

Stranger Care: Sarah Sentilles in conversation with Ashley Hay

Byron Writers Festival

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