Join us in in The Garden Room of Buda House as we celebrate writers, books, stories, poetry and poets.
We promise a day of fascinating conversations, inspiring storytelling and an opportunity to meet, greet, question and hang out with some of Australia's most interesting writers and poets.
You can come for an individual session, multiple-sessions or make the most of a ‘day pass’ and enjoy a 15% discount.
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There’ll be complimentary coffee and tea available throughout the day but you can purchase a ‘lunchbox’ via TryBooking if you plan to spend the lunch hour with us and take a moment to wander the stunning gardens at Buda.
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Our final session of the day comes with a complimentary glass of bubbles and our bookshop for the day will include all of our guest authors' and poets’ books as well as a range of beautiful new releases.
By proceeding to purchase tickets using the button below you accept the Northern Books general terms and conditions
About the speakers
Luke Horton
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Luke Horton’s first novel, The Fogging, was published in 2020, and his second, Time Together, was published March 2025. Luke teaches creative writing and editing at RMIT and the Faber Writing Academy and his work has been published in various publications, including Meanjin, The Guardian and The Saturday Paper.
Time Together
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Trying to avoid the loneliness that’s come in the wake of his mother’s recent passing, Phil has invited a bunch of old friends to stay with him on the coast. Tomorrow, Bella and Tim will arrive with their two kids, one on the brink of puberty; and the next day, Jo and Lucas will come too, with their little one. Then there’s Annie, who will be by herself. Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe it’s just what they all need.
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The story of a beach holiday told by four different people, Time Together is a novel about different kinds of love, different kinds of loneliness, and the way spending time together can bring out the best and worst in each other.
Kylie Mirmohamadi
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Kylie Mirmohamadi is a writer and academic whose work and research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th-century English literature. Kylie has published widely in the academic sector, most recently on the long afterlives of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.
She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2022 and her unpublished manuscripts have been highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2020). Diving, Falling is her first novel.
Diving, Falling.
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It’s never too late to rewrite your own story.
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For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken’s endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.
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When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own …
Diving, Falling is an elegant, exhilarating journey through grief, betrayal, and the intoxicating rediscovery of joy. Ripe with wickedly wry observations, unashamedly bold and sexy, it examines the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.
Sonia Orchard
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Sonia Orchard is an award-winning author, freelance writer, speaker, writing teacher/mentor and survivor advocate with degrees in music, literature, environmental science/marine biology and a PhD in creative writing. She writes and speaks about social justice, gendered violence and the environment, drawing upon both research and her lived experience of sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Sonia’s books include Something More Wonderful, The Virtuoso and Into the Fire and her memoir, Groomed, is about her experience of going through the Australian justice system as a complainant in a historical childhood sexual abuse case.
In 2019, Sonia founded and was the festival director of the Mountain Writers Festival, Australia's first writers' festival to focus exclusively on the environment.
Groomed
Sonia Orchard was in her forties when she told a therapist about the boyfriend she had when she was fifteen. Sure, he had been a decade older than her, but it was consensual ... wasn't it? To her surprise, Sonia broke down in tears, then began to shake uncontrollably - an unmistakable expression of trauma that lasted for days. She was clearly not okay, but could the relationship she'd thought was loving really have been abuse? Had she been groomed?
Years later, her own daughters now teenagers and with the March4Justice changing the conversation about sexual assault, Sonia tentatively called the police and began the gruelling journey through the legal system.
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In Groomed, Orchard shifts between memoir and research; delving into culture, neuroscience and evolution as well as unpicking the enduring narratives that fuel these issues. As she navigates her way through a legal system stacked against victims of sexual assault, the obstacles to justice become clearer and more confronting than ever.
Kylie Ladd
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Kylie Ladd is a novelist, psychologist and freelance writer. Her six previous novels have been published in Australia and overseas. She has also co-edited and co-authored two non-fiction books, and her essays and articles have been published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Griffith Review, Meanjin, O Magazine, Good Medicine, Kill Your Darlings and Reader's Digest, amongst others. Kylie holds a PhD in neuropsychology and lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children.
The Mix Up
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A beautifully told and thought-provoking novel about a mix-up that leaves two children wondering who they really are and where they belong . . .
What would you do if you found out you'd been raising another couple's child - and they've been raising yours?
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Fourteen years ago, Kelsey and Raf Maccioni left hospital with their newborn daughter, Ammy. Days later, Shona and Nathan James welcomed the birth of their son, Zac.
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The only thing the two couples have in common is the IVF clinic where their dreams came true. They are strangers to each other – for now.
Fast forward to April 2024 . . . Ammy has grown into a rebellious young woman, and Zac is a kind but introverted teenager.
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Life may not be perfect for either family, but like everyone else they are muddling through.
Until Ammy takes a DNA test for a school project. At first the results are puzzling. Then disturbing. Then earth-shattering - when the IVF clinic admits a terrible mistake.
Bonny Cassidy
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Bonny Cassidy is the author of four poetry collections – Certain Fathoms, Final Theory, Chatelaine (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award), and Monument. She is co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.
Her essays and criticism on Australian literature and culture have been widely published, and her awards include an Asialink fellowship and a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She teaches Creative Writing at RMIT University and lives in the bush on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Central Victoria.
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Bonny’s most recent work Monument moves seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation - it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries.
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Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of 'collected memory' against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin's archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy's considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?
Ross Donlon
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Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine, Victoria, where he has convened poetry events for twenty years and is publisher of Mark Time Books.
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He is the winner of two international poetry competitions, the Ford Memorial Medal and the Launceston Cup and was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship by Varuna Writers’ Centre.
Ross is represented in numerous anthologies in Australia and several in the U.K. He has read his work extensively in Australia and the U.K.as well as in Norway, Romania and Poland.
The Blue Dressing Gown, a sequence of poems about his father, a WW2 American serviceman, was a program on the ABC, Radio National’s Poetica.
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The Naming of Clouds is his seventh book of poetry
Jasper Peach
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Jasper Peach is a trans, non-binary and disabled writer, speaker and parent.
They are passionate about equitable access and inclusion, focused on the dismantling of misplaced shame via storytelling.
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Their written work has been published in The Age, HireUp, The Big Issue, Archer, The Guardian, Verandah, Australian Poetry Journal, Meanjin, ABC and SBS online.
With a background in Auslan interpreting, broadcasting and civil celebrancy, writing has continued their personal trend of being all about communication and community. Their first book, You’ll be a Wonderful Parent, was published March 2023 by Hardie Grant and is a celebration of rainbow families of all kinds.
Andy Jackson
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Andy Jackson’s first collection, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and in 2020 his collection Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award. His 2022 collection Human Looking won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the ALS Gold Medal, and was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Andy is co-editor of Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability
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He has featured at literary events and arts festivals in Ireland, India, the USA and across Australia, and has co-edited disability-themed issues of the literary journals Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal. Andy Jackson works as a creative writing teacher and tutor for community organisations and universities.
