Sarah, Head of Marketing and Digital
Sarah is set to sink into a trio of highly touted contemporary fiction. Caro Claire Burke’s internet-igniting debut Yesteryear splinters the hypocrisy of nostalgia and contrived personas in thrilling fashion. Danish writer Olga Ravn is taking Sarah even further into the past with a wickedly bewitching tale of hysteria and misogyny in The Wax Child. Lastly, Audition by Katie Kitamura meticulously dismantles and rebuilds our perspective on relationships over a lunch in Manhattan.
Julia, Associate Program Producer
In this towering stack, Julia will leap through the centuries and jump from genre to genre. Firm Festival favourites Mariana Enriquez and Drusilla Modjeska offer two vastly different though equally magnetic non-fiction titles. Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl and Jenny Odell’s Saving Time promise tonics to the seemingly inescapable pressures of modernity. Two classics, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, chronicle stories of violence and perseverance in periods of great upheaval. For welcome reprieve, there’s laughs aplenty in store with two of Terry Pratchett’s iconic comic fantasies high on the list.
Viv, Digital Marketing Manager
With the 2026 goal of reading 20 Booker Prize winners, and only five finished to date, Viv is accelerating her progress this winter. The hauntingly beautiful 2017 winner Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and the emotionally-charged 2006 winner The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai are the next acclaimed reads in her journey. Woven in-between, new Festival favourite Michael Pedersen offers a healthy dose of love and compassion in Boyfriends while Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear keeps things contemporary despite its time-twisting narrative.
Michael, Digital Marketing Coordinator
Human-centred conflicts and loving portraits of community outline Michael’s upcoming reads. After an indelible first impression at the Festival, Maria Reva gives prescient reminders of societies fragility in Endling, while Shankari Chandran dives into the shadowy truth of post-civil war Sri Lanka in her fiery first thriller, Unfinished Business. Shifting tones, the edges of our harsh realities are chamfered off with tender eloquence in Niall William’s This is Happiness and raw honesty in Cameron Stewart’s Why do Horses Run?.