This page lists upcoming events associated with the project.
Event Details: 25 - 27 September 2024, Online
Presented by UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL).
This three-day event will take place on Zoom. It will begin with the ASAL Patron’s Lecture on the evening of 25 September 2024. The symposium will then continue between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM Australian Central standard time on September 26 and 27. Captioning and Auslan will be available for all sessions.
From short-statured Rocca in Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Haxby’s Circus to autistic Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s Rosie series, Australian literature frequently relies on representations of disabled people for narrative intrigue. Yet, regardless of how nuanced such representations may be, they cannot substitute for the experiences of Australian disabled authors who, in contrast, are often marginalised or erased. Through poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, these authors continue to demonstrate the complex reality of impairment and of being disabled in Australia.
This free, online symposium aims to highlight these complexities. For registration and programme details, please click here.
To learn more about Australian disabled authors and how their impairments have shaped their lives as writers and their craft, visit our database of writers and read our case studies.
Over the next two years we will focus on historical writers, then we will concentrate on contemporary writers. Through this approach, we aim to highlight a lineage of disabled writers which has long been overlooked in Australian literature.
