First Tuesday Book Club is ABC TV's first nationally televised book club. Hosted by Jennifer Byrne, it draws on the basic models of national and international book clubs. First Tuesday Book Club gathers Australian booklovers together each month, bringing to the screen the pleasures that draw millions of clubbers worldwide to these groups with their shared love of reading. It is a nationally televised forum for literary debate and conversation not easily found elsewhere.
Host Jennifer Byrne is joined every month by regular panellists Jason Steger and Marieke Hardy, along with two guest panellists.
They are joined for this special Sydney Writers’ Festival First Tuesday Book Club by Festival guests, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Richard Flanagan.
MARIEKE HARDY (LOCAL) MARIEKE HARDY is a screenwriter, blogger, radio broadcaster and bon vivant. In addition to her regular column in The Age, she is a senior contributor for Frankie magazine and has been known to make fairly erratic benefactions to Crikey while under the influence of gin. She has written for reasonably prestigious Australian television dramas and several others it’s probably best not to name for fear of physical violence. She makes Jennifer Byrne’s life an unbridled misery once a month on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club, and can’t decide whether her favourite novel of all time is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces or John Fante’s Ask The Dust.
JENNIFER BYRNE (LOCAL) JENNIFER BYRNE began as a cadet journalist with The Age in 1972. At 23, she was posted to San Francisco as The Age’s West Coast correspondent. In 1981 Jennifer joined Nine’s Sunday program before moving across to 60 Minutes. In 1993 she became the morning presenter of ABC’s Radio 2BL and in 1995 was appointed publishing director of Reed Books. In 1999 Jennifer joined Foreign Correspondent, working as host and reporter for five years. Jennifer joined the Bulletin in 2003 as a senior writer, working on the weekly Lunch With... column, for which she won two national magazine awards. She continued to host the ABC’s My Favourite Book program before becoming the host of the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club.
JASON STEGER (INTERSTATE) JASON STEGER is the books editor of The Age and The Sunday Age. Born in Wimbledon in 1956 he attained BA Hons in American and English Literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury. He began his career in journalism as a sports reporter in 1980 before shifting into business journalism, working for the Financial Times in London. Jason moved to Melbourne in 1987 and worked on the now defunct Melbourne Herald. He joined The Sunday Age as business editor in 1990 before moving into arts and books journalism. He became books editor of The Age and Sunday Age in 2000.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (INTERNATIONAL)
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE grew up in Nigeria. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her work has been translated into 30 languages. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught introductory fiction. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. Her new collection is The Thing Around Your Neck.
Her participation is supported by HarperCollins Publishers.
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