Margo Lanagan

From the Clarion West website: Each week during the workshop, we present one of our six current instructors reading her or his best new work from recent books, unpublished stories, or novels-in-progress. The featured reader also answers questions about writing, teaching, editing, and other topics. Margo ... (more)Lanagan invokes the primal power of fairy tales through characters driven by joy, sorrow, and heart-clenching secrets. Her collection Black Juice received two World Fantasy awards; she also won World Fantasy awards for her novel Tender Morsels and her novella “Sea-hearts.” Making a rare visit from her native Australia, Lanagan will share her writing live and fresh with the storyseekers in all of us.

Writing about history takes many forms, some fictional, some fact, and many somewhere in between. Simon Schama is an historian whose hugely imaginative narratives have won him legions of fans, whether he is talking about A History of Britain or The American Future. Daniel Kehlmann's epic novel about ... (more)the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, is a fictional account of the very different worlds of two real Enlightenment thinkers. In Margo Lanagan's bitter folktale Tender Morsels the writer creates a future for her characters by imagining a past. All of these writers are storytellers and each has a unique way of engaging with the historical. Join these writers in conversation with Lydia Wevers as they talk about the relationship between narrative and history. Together they discuss the ways writing the future can be a form of history, and discover if writing about the past is, in some ways, a fiction.

In response to the controversy surrounding her novel Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan asks, "How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life, if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty, or violence, or ... (more)unexpected shocks and surprises?" In recent years the young adult novel has become a much disputed genre; simultaneously lauded and condemned, it is variously described as too violent and serious for its presumed audience, too juvenile and fantastical to be considered literature, and as a marketing invention that never in fact had an audience. Margo Lanagan and Neil Gaiman have earned reputations as ‘crossover' writers. Lanagan's Tender Morsels has been lauded as her first ‘adult' novel as well as a young adult classic while Neil Gaiman's work continues to cheerfully decline all attempts at classification. Join them in conversation with Kate De Goldi as she asks: "What makes it children's literature?"

"I write about children and young adults," says Margo Lanagan, "because I'm interested in what it's like to piece together the world, to make connections and realise things for the first time..." In a 20-year writing career, Lanagan has explored, with startling emotional depth and technical range, young ... (more)characters in both real-world and fantasy settings, in novels and short fiction, in both animal and human habitats. Among this work is the prodigally imaginative trilogy of short stories, White Time, Black Juice, and Red Spikes, which earned her an international readership and a slew of awards. Her lyricism and inventiveness combine with a robust approach to the subject matter for young readers. Tender Morsels, a powerful re-imagining of the Snow White and Rose Red tale, has courted controversy with its unflinching evocations of the characters' sexual lives and the devastations they bear. It was joint winner of Best Novel in the 2009 World Fantasy Awards. Join her in coversation with Eirlys Hunter.

This is the official launch of the book. Jan Cornall will do the honours