About the Event
To celebrate Love to Read Local Week, join us for a fascinating panel with Mandurah local authors Louise Helfgott and Alan Fyfe facilitated by Rashida Murphy.
Love to Read Local Week is a state-wide campaign by Writing WA showcasing and celebrating Western Australia’s many wonderful writers and illustrators, and the books they create.
Light Lunch served at 12noon
Panel presentation 12.30pm
Book sales and signing 1.30pm
Places limited.
Bookings essential.
Please wait for confirmation email before attending the event.
About the Author
Alan Fyfe is a Jewish writer from Mandurah, the unceded country of the Binjareb people, whose verse and prose can be found in Westerly, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, and Cottonmouth. He was an inaugural editor of UWA creative writing journal, Trove, and a prose editor for American web journal, Unlikely Stories.
Alan is a winner of the Karl Popper Philosophy Award, was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, won second in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, and has been selected as a WA Poets’ Inc Emerging Poet for 2022 / 23. His first novel, T, received shortlistings for both the T.A.G Hungerford Prize (Australia) and the Chaffinch Press Aware Prize (Ireland). T is published by Transit Lounge.
Most recently, Alan’s poetry collection, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos, was awarded silver for the Flying Islands unpublished manuscript award and will be published with Gazebo Books in 2024. He is currently writing his second novel, The Cross Thieves, a prequel to T in ring composition, as part of a doctorate in creative writing at UWA and teaching poetry.
Louise Helfgott is an award-winning writer with a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University. She has had an extensive body of work published and plays produced. Her achievements include Light in her Eye which won the Todhunter Literary Award in 2014 and performed at the Perth Fringe Festival in 2018. Her play Potchnagoola, based on the mentoring relationship between the West Australian writer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and her concert pianist brother, David Helfgott, was commissioned and performed for the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Prichard’s death in 2019. Frames, written as part of her doctoral project, was short-listed in the national Playwriting Australia competition and produced by Class Act Theatre for a three-week season at the Subiaco Arts Centre in 2014. She co-won the Magdalena Prize for Feminist Research at ECU in 2013. Other credits include The Bridge, a finalist in New Musicals Australia in 2011 and A Closer Sky, nominated for an AWGIE award in 2005. Her poetry anthology Can You Hold the Sun? was published in 2004. Louise’s memoir Thistledown Seed was shortlisted in the Dorothy Hewett Awards for an unpublished manuscript in 2018. Louise lives in Mandurah WA with her husband.
Rashida Murphy is the author of The Historian’s Daughter (UWA Publishing, 2016) which was shortlisted in the Dundee International Book Prize. Her second book, a collection of short stories titled The Bonesetter’s Fee (2022) was a runner-up in the Carmel Bird Award and shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Rashida’s prose, poetry and fiction has been published in more than fifty anthologies and journals world-wide. Rashida has judged the WA Premier’s Literary Awards, the T.A.G Hungerford Awards, the KSP short fiction Award, the Ellen Kemp Prize and the Tallus Prize. She is a writing tutor and mentor to emerging writers and lives in Perth’s southern suburbs with a multilingual cat and a patient husband.
