The Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Copyright Agency and The University of Tasmania present:
The 2016 ASAL Patron’s Lecture: “My Brilliant Career and the Wobble of Fiction: A Journey along the Boundary between Autobiography and Fiction”
Featuring: Author Maggie Mackellar
In 1902 Miles Franklin’s first and most famous novel was published.
My Brilliant Career is a fictional autobiography and its hard to say whether the book was more notorious because its author was a woman, whose heroine rejected a good marriage, or because many of the characters were uncomfortably recognizable for Miles’ family and acquaintances. Miles scoffed at those unsophisticated readers who insisted her novel was not fiction. It would seem over one hundred years later in the age of the publishing success of Ferrante, Knausgaurd, Garner and Solstad not much has changed.
Today, readers are still eager for the immediacy of the personal story, and writers continue to mine their personal histories for the seeds of larger stories.
Join author Maggie Mackellar as she explores the arbitrary boundaries between fiction and nonfiction – more broadly asking, ‘what can fiction do that nonfiction can’t?’ and why… in this age of multiple truths are such definitions event necessary?
About Maggie Mackellar
Maggie lives on the east coast of Tasmania. She is the award winning author of two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada, Core of my Heart, My Country and Strangers in a Foreign Land, and two bestselling memoirs, When it Rains and How to Get There. Her essays have been published in Island, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, The Good Weekend, and Best Australian Essays. Her first novel will be published by Random House in 2017.