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Making a Writer

Where Ireland succeeds and Australia struggles

Colm Toibin (Photo credit Reynaldo Rivera)
Charlotte Wood (Photo credit Carly Earl)
Michael Williams
Sunday 25 May 2025
2-3pm
Event Code: 130
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Available via Livestream Day Pass

Available at select venues via Live & Local

What enables writers to grow and flourish?

Writing is mostly a solitary pursuit that draws on individual reserves of talent and skill. But writers are also part of a national community that can help, or hinder, celebrate or ignore them. Ireland provides bountiful support to its writers and literary ecosystem, but Australia fails to adequately nurture its own.

Listen to prominent writers Laureate for Irish Fiction Colm Tóibín (Brooklyn, Long Island) and Booker Prize–shortlisted author Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional, The Natural Way of Things) discuss how they became writers and the state of their nations’ literature. What can be done to wake Australia up to the need to support its writers? With host Michael Williams. 

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Colm Tóibín appears thanks to the support of Rosie Williams and John Grill AO.

Supported by

Carriageworks, Bay 17
245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW, 2015