Location: Prahran, Vic., Australia

Barcelona-born, LA-based author Carlos Ruiz Zafón writes fantastical literary thrillers packed with intrigue and adventure – with books themselves at the very centre of his stories.

His admirers include Stephen King and Margaret Atwood, as well as legions of fans.

The Shadow of the Wind, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, was the first in a quartet for younger readers that takes its inspiration from sources as disparate as Enid Blyton and Alexander Dumas.

His stories set in Barcelona’s (fictional) Cemetery of Forgotten Books have ‘the blissful narrative drive of a high-class mystery’ – and started, he says, with the image of ‘a wonderful labyrinth of books, this kind of mysterious library hidden inside a place’.

The Watcher in the Shadows, the third in the series, has just been released – to great anticipation. He’ll be in conversation with Sian Prior. (rodneyvc)… (more)

Studying a book or film can be a short-cut to consigning it to boredom. But our Texts in the City series – a gift to students, their teachers and lifelong learners – brings the VCE English and Literature lists to life.

Each week, our hosts – authors Lili Wilkinson and Tony Birch – will interview experts intimately familiar with the texts, unearthing those hidden gems that could help your essay shine.

This time around, we look at Bernard Edelman’s Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam.

Presented in association with The Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. (rodneyvc)… (more)

Anita Desai has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize; the Guardian recently called her ‘India’s greatest living writer’.

Her latest book, The Artist of Disappearance, blends irony, sympathy and a clear-eyed criticism of contemporary culture, in three novellas that explore the frailty and transforming power of art.

Maggie Gee has praised the way Desai’s work hides ‘devastating criticisms of the status quo just beneath the jeweled seduction of her surfaces’.

With influences as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Rilke, her books chronicle ‘forgotten, vanishing worlds, art and language that exist on the margins’, in the words of her daughter (and Booker winner) Kiran Desai.

The India of Anita Desai’s childhood transformed after Partition; later she left for new homes in England and the United States, though India remains her canvas.

This experience, she believes, led her to become a writer – to make sense of a fractured world. ‘It’s like having a jigsaw puzzle and having to see how to put the pieces together.’

Anita Desai appears as part of a double-bill with William Dalrymple. (rodneyvc)… (more)

William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer and director of India’s Jaipur literary festival. He fell in love with India aged eighteen, and the country has been at the centre of his writing since.

His latest book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, is the last in what he calls the East India Company trilogy, following White Mughals and The Last Mughal.

It tells what happened when the British Governor-General of India was convinced to invade Afghanistan – in order to save India, ‘the jewel of the British empire’, from an imaginary Russian threat. Of course, this paved the path for subsequent wars … and sheds devastating light on the one being waged now.

Dalrymple has immersed himself in literature telling the Afghan side of the story; the result is, according to the Guardian, ‘a racy tale of imperial misadventure and Victorian jihadism’ that shows us ‘ourselves as others see us’.

William Dalrymple appears as part of a double-bill with Anita Desai. (rodneyvc)… (more)

Articles and commentaries on Asperger’s Syndrome are rife with references to the ‘condition’, ‘sufferers’ and ‘disability’. But many people who live with an Asperger’s diagnosis – for themselves or their families – experience it as a difference, not a disability.

Asperger’s people are often badly organised in their everyday lives, but terrifically focused in their areas of interest – which often turn into careers. Einstein, Bill Gates and Woody Allen are just a few success stories speculated to be on the autistic spectrum. Then again, if something’s not a disability, why should it attract funding and special compensation? And what about all those people who identify as Asperger’s because they want to be special? Is that a real thing?

Jo Case, author of Boomer and Me: A Memoir of Motherhood, and Asperger’s will tackle some myths head-on, and try to untangle these knotty issues, drawing on personal experience.

Lunchbox/Soapbox

Sometimes there’s nothing better than a good rant. Every Thursday, the Wheeler Centre hosts an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, where writers and thinkers can have their say on the topics that won’t let them sleep at night.

Featuring some of our most compelling voices across just about every sector of human endeavour you can imagine, the themes dominating Lunchbox/Soapbox are proudly idiosyncratic. BYO lunch. Ideas provided.

Presenter

Jo Case

Jo Case is the Wheeler Centre’s senior writer/editor. Her first book, Boomer and Me: A memoir of motherhood, and Asperger’s is published by Hardie Grant in Australia and the UK. (rodneyvc)… (more)

The Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript is much-anticipated … most winners (and shortlistees) have found publication.

Last year’s winner, Graeme Simsion, famously won a worldwide, million-dollar-plus publishing deal for his quirky romantic comedy The Rosie Project.

Join us for the opening night of the Emerging Writers' Festival, where Graeme will officially pass the baton, announcing the winner of the 2013 prize, presented by Heidi Victoria, Minister for the Arts.

Poet Astrid Lorange will deliver a special keynote address to mark the occasion of the tenth Emerging Writers' Festival.

Join the Wheeler Centre and the Emerging Writers' Festival on a night that celebrates new writing talent – and showcases the next generation of writing stars (rodneyvc)… (more)

Sylvia Nasar’s megabestseller A Beautiful Mind was ‘perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century’, according to the New York Times.

This master storyteller has a knack for translating economics for the general reader – and placing it in the rich context of the characters, cities and historical events that drove it forward.

Grand Pursuit traces the birth and progress of modern economics, which grew from the idea that humans are not, after all, powerless in the face of an all-determining god – that we can determine our own lives, on a society-sized scale. This idea, which we take for granted, is only 150-odd years old. Historically, it’s a newborn notion.

Nasar traces this development from the days of Dickens and Thomas Carlyle in a rapidly industralising 1840s Britain, to Marx and Engels, ‘the odd couple of the proletarian revolution’, and through to the current day.

The Washington Post has praised ‘the breadth and depth of Nasar’s research and the elegance of her prose’.

In this book, she brings economic history to life – and makes it matter.

Sylvia Nasar appears as part of a double-bill with Kate Atkinson. (rodneyvc)… (more)

Kate Atkinson’s first book, Behind the Scenes of the Museum, beat Salman Rushdie to win the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Since then, she’s captured readers' hearts with her tough-but-empathetic Yorkshire PI, Jackson Brodie.

Her latest book, the wildly inventive Life After Life, is shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction – and hotly tipped for this year’s Booker.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you got it right? The characters in this genre-bending book get just that.

Atkinson will be in conversation with Sue Turnbull.

Kate Atkinson appears as part of a double-bill with Sylvia Nasar.
Kate Atkinson is presented in association with Sisters in Crime. (rodneyvc)… (more)

There are two ways to be ordinary: either true ordinary or the false kind.

To be true ordinary you forgo the temptation to be better than you are. You feel no great effort in this. You feel perfectly natural and complete. False ordinary is a different matter entirely. It is an affectation you must work hard at.

The mainstream culture is comfortable with ordinary people. There are benefits therefore in holding yourself back. Beware false ordinary, embrace the true. How can you tell which is which, though?

Extraordinary memoirist, novelist and writer-of-all trades Craig Sherborne will tackle the question of ordinariness – its various kinds, what it means, and how to use (or fake) it to your advantage.

Venue and booking details for this event are forthcoming.

Craig Sherborne’s highly acclaimed memoir Hoi Polloi was published in 2005 and shortlisted for several literary awards. Its sequel, Muck, was published in 2007 and won the Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 2008. His first novel, published by Text in 2011 The Amateur Science of Love (Text, 2011) won the 2012 Best Writing Prize and was short-listed for a Victorian Premier’s Literature Award. He is a former Wal Cherry Play of the Year award-winner. His verse-drama, Look at Everything Twice for Me, was published by Currency Press, his first volume of poetry, Bullion, by Penguin in 1995, and his second, Necessary Evil, by Black Inc. in 2005. Sherborne’s journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies. (rodneyvc)… (more)