Fullers Poets: Women’s Untold Stories

How intelligent and seemingly social women can be exhausted from undiagnosed autism/ADHD; and how some women end up travelling on unseen, gruelling medical and IVF rollercoasters to become pregnant. Esther and Susan will converse on these issues and on the role of poetry in helping to cope with, and raise awareness about, these challenges. They will read compelling poems from their acclaimed new books, She Doesn’t Seem Autistic and Dancing With Empty Prams.

Esther Ottaway is the winner of the Tasmanian Literary Awards Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry and People’s Choice Award, the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, the Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis Award, and has been shortlisted in the international prizes, the MPU, Montreal, Bridport and Mslexia. Her new collection due out in July is She Doesn’t Seem Autistic (Puncher & Wattmann).

Susan Austin is a poet, eco-socialist activist and occupational therapist. She facilitates group programs, including a creative writing program, in a mental health clinic in Hobart. Her first poetry collection, Undertow, was published by Walleah Press, an earlier version winning First Commended in the Best First Book category of the IP Picks competition. She was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts grant to work with Gina Mercer on her verse novel Dancing With Empty Prams. In 2021 she won First Prize and Highly Commended in the Fellowship of Australian Writers Tasmania Poetry Prize and was Commended in the Woorilla Poetry Prize. Susan has been a guest performer at various writing festivals and has been widely published in newspapers and journals.

Join Esther and Susan at the Afterword Cafe.

You can purchase tickets below.