Matt Finch recently took some time out of his hectic zombie-fighting, time-travelling schedule to tell us about the power of interactive storytelling, ahead of his Storytelling for a 21st Century Audience workshop. What is interactive storytelling and how can immersive narratives enhance the storytelling experience? Interactive storytelling means creating an event where all participants shape […]

Linda Funnell will be running DIY Digital: Reaching Your Readers with E-books and Print on Demand on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 November. Here she asks one of her guest speakers, Anna Maguire, about the trials and triumphs of digital publishing. How quickly is the digital publishing landscape changing? Is it getting easier for DIY […]

 Though readers are often baffled by the concept of creative non-fiction, we all read tonnes of it: magazine profiles, longform narrative journalism, memoirs and essays. Creative non-fiction doesn’t just factually report, it tells stories of people, places and events.  Lee Gutkind sums up creative non-fiction in one simple sentence: “true stories well told.” It can […]

In the lead-up to our monstrous Talking Writing, Nyssa Harkness tells us why she loves zombies. She’ll be joining Kate Forsyth and Matt Finch on Thursday 26 October to discuss monsters and villians in kid’s and YA fiction. What are some monsters, baddies or villains you’ve come across in kids and YA fiction that made an […]

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an event where writers all over the world come together with a shared goal of each writing a fifty-thousand word novel. As the name implies, it takes place within a single month. For those that haven’t written anything of a comparable length before it can be daunting, but these […]

Ahead of our Creative Non-Fiction Festival on Saturday 2 November, festival director Benjamin Law joins us for a quick chat about jaw-droppingly good stories. Lee Gutkind describes creative non-fiction as ‘true stories well told.’ Can you expand on this definition for our readers? It’s odd: even now, some people think “creative non-fiction” is a contradiction […]

The shortlist for the 2013 Blake Poetry Prize has been revealed at an event at UNSW Galleries, College of Fine Arts (COFA), Paddington this evening. The 2013 Judges selected nine poems for the shortlist, describing them as “exceptional poems” which were “particularly notable for their developed narrative and/or lyric craft.” The poems are judged blind, […]

In an age of touchscreens, desktops, and video-on-demand, the ability to handle visual communication is an advantage for every writer. It’s not always about artistic technique, but a willingness to embrace the use of images to get your message across. Matt Finch talks graphic storytelling with Pat Grant. “Visual metaphor is an incredibly powerful force,” […]

What exactly is a short story? In one sense it is completely obvious – a story that is short – but defining it is something far more complicated than issues of length. The short story has always been at the core of everything I write from my collection of travel fictions, (Small Indiscretions: stories of […]