Why do writers take nature as their topic? Can art change people’s attitudes to the environment? Can we make a better future for nature in Tasmania by writing about it?
Melissa Manning, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn and Keely Jobe all contributed to the Tasmanian Land Conservancy’s book, Breathing Space, a collection of essays, poems and stories reflecting on nature and discussing ‘where to next?’. To celebrate this beautiful book’s rerelease in compact, softback format, they’ll be in conversation with Jane Rawson.
Jane is a Breathing Space editor, who also writes novels about how we might change the world, including her latest, A History of Dreams. She is the fiction editor of Island magazine.
Melissa Manning is an Australian writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction. Her debut interlinked story collection, Smokehouse, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the University of Southern Queensland Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. Her writing has been published in Australia, the United Kingdom, and America.
Keely Jobe is a writer and PhD candidate living on the east coast of lutruwita/Tasmania. Her writing interests include queer and feminist philosophies, nature, conservation and place.
Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn is a young writer whose fiction and non-fiction have won the Ultimo Prize and the Scribe Nonfiction Prize. She is the previous editor of Voiceworks.