In conversation

Gunflower: Laura Jean McKay in conversation with Rayne Allison

Online sales for this event have now closed. You can still purchase tickets at the door.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

The short stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) — winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, and the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.

Laura will now be in conversation with Dr Rayne Allison, Fullers’ very own intrepid Reading Group leader. Rayne has (somewhat) recently returned Tasmania after having spent fifteen years abroad teaching History, Classics, and Great Books classes at various universities in the USA and UK.

Join them at the Afterword Cafe.

(Please note, Rayne is replacing Robbie Arnott as moderator of this discussion – apologies for any confusion caused.)