Rediscovering Again: Christina Stead/Elizabeth Harrower Symposium

SoutherlyNews

One of our excellent editors, Dr Elizabeth McMahon, is organising a two-day symposium on Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower. It runs at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, at the beginning of next month. It includes two evenings of writers’ panels – Gail Jones, David Malouf, and Delia Falconer talking on Christina Stead, and Fiona McFarlane, Ivor Indyk, and Michelle de Kretser talking on Elizabeth Harrower. If those combinations weren’t exciting enough, the panels are entirely free.

All the information is here and here, as well as below. We’d love to see you there.

Cc271175-ChristinaSteadandElizabethHarrower

When: 3 Dec 2015, 9am – 5pm
4 Dec 2015, 9am – 5pm
Venue: UNSW Kensington Campus
Who: UNSW School of the Arts & Media, the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and the Copyright Agency

In 1928, aged 26, Christina Stead set sail for London. That same year, Elizabeth Harrower was born. In the final decade of Stead’s life, these two writers met and became friends; Harrower was among the small group of mourners who attended Stead’s cremation in 1983. Each admired the other’s writing, but despite observable echoes and correspondences across their fiction, they did not directly influence one another; each encountered the major works of the other belatedly.

Occasioned by the recent reissuing of their respective bodies of work, this joint symposium focuses on the two writers in turn. Although we want to mark their work separately, there is a critical space for parallels, intersections and divergences to emerge as we seek to register and explore the irregular modernities and disrupted chronologies that patterned their writing lives, their work and their reception over time.

Writers’ Panels

As part of the symposium Rediscovering Again: Christina Stead and Elizabeth Harrower, UNSWriting is pleased to present the following two writers’ panels:

Christina Stead Writers’ Panel

Featuring Delia Falconer, Gail Jones and David Malouf
Thursday 3 December
Io Myers Studio | UNSW Kensington | 6pm for 6.30pm start

Elizabeth Harrower Writers’ Panel

Featuring Michelle de Kretser, Ivor Indyk and Fiona McFarlane
Friday 4 December
Io Myers Studio | UNSW Kensington | 6pm for 6.30pm start