Birch-&-HylandMelbourne Writers Festival 2013

Friday 23 August 5:30pm AEST

A National Literature

Keynote: Tony Birch joined by MJ Hyland
Chair: Peter Goldsworthy

Author Biographies:

Tony Birch‘s books include Shadowboxing (2006), Father’s Day (2009), and Blood (2011), shortlisted for the Miles Franklin award (2012). His new collection of stories, The Promise, will be released in 2014. Tony teaches at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in history and a Master of Arts in writing. His short fiction has been published widely, as have his critical essays. In addition to his creative and critical writing Tony Birch works with community groups and secondary students as an educator. He also does collaborative work with artists and activist. Tony lives in Carlton, just around the corner from where he was born.

MJ Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three multi-award-winning novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden Prize and The Encore Prize. M.J Hyland has twice been longlisted for The Orange Prize (2004 and 2009), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2004 and 2007) and This is How (2009) was longlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC prize.

M.J Hyland is a lecturer in Creative Writing in The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester where she has run fiction workshops alongside Martin Amis (2007-2010), Colm Tóibín (2010-2011) and Jeanette Winterson (2013). M.J Hyland also runs regular Fiction Masterclasses in The Guardian Masterclass Programme, has twice been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize (2011 and 2012) and publishes in The Guardian ‘How to Write’ series and The Financial Times, the LRB, Granta and elsewhere. Hyland is also co-founder of The Hyland and Byrne Editing Firm. She has made more than a dozen appearances on national and international radio, including Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and has been appointed as writer-in-residence in programmes at Arizona State University (Feb, 2014) and writer-in-residence at Griffith University, Australia (June/July 2013).