Watch our event on Ukraine at The Wheeler Centre.

Co-written with Juliet Rogers. Original title – The Rai Zone.

Reading Annie Ernaux at the time of Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine.

This chapter is a conversation with my friend of 40 years Alexandra who has just escaped from Kharkiv.

“On the Need for Aesthetic Wildness” + “Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy” in conversation with Namwali Serpell.

Thank you to Christos Tsiolkas for the introduction I’ll never forget. Thank you to Jean Bachoura and Flatwhite Damascus for the funniest and most unsettling “warm-up act”.

“My disbelief is not diminishing. Maybe because this feels like a gift of cosmic proportions. I wasn’t born into English, I am that ridiculous person who spent a near-decade writing a small book, I couldn’t even call myself a 'writer' till recently without cringing. My biggest thanks.”

“Many people whom the world calls “survivors” reject that word’s shadowy sense of moral elevation—how it implies that they (the still-heres) survived either because there was something morally special about them or because, by virtue of their experience, they grew an extra moral gear.”

Produced by the very brilliant Camilla Hannan.

“I don’t like books that are tightly choreographed – some of it just felt right – and I didn’t want to do the manipulative, conventional thing, but I did want the book to end in nothing but one person and another person, one person’s skin and another person’s skin, one person’s memory and another person’s. Nothing else. Just that.”

With Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy. Moderated by Anderson Tepper.

I am awe of these supremely smart, necessary, generous questions from Mireille Juchau.

Kim Hill, true legend.

A big thanks to Simon Warrender, the founder and director of the prize. And equally big congratulations to Alison Lester and Jamie Marina Lau.

Extract from Dangerous Ideas about Mothers, edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson, published in the Sydney Review of Books.