2023 Update – Centre for Critical and Creative Writing
FROM THE CHAIR
Associate Professor Stephen Carleton
Hello Everyone,
I’m Stephen Carleton, Chair of the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing, and together with our Director Helen Marshall and our Events Manager Olivia Brown, would like to welcome you all to 2023, and the Year of the Rabbit here at UQ!
We’ve got an exciting year of events planned at the CCCW. Having hosted symposia in 2021 and 2022 around the themes of literary adaptation and writing the Anthropocene, we’re turning our attention to the broader notion of ‘recovery’ this year. Each of the events and the special guests we’re bringing to UQ will engage with questions that settle around this idea: How are we recovering in the wake of the pandemic and the devastating effect it had on the arts? How are writers for live performance, our novelists and poets all feeling about the Federal government’s Revive arts policy? Will it lead to rejuvenation and replenishing as its title suggests? And what of our publishers, producers and booksellers? How are our writing institutions and means of distribution – our literary supply chains – recovering from a period of lockdowns, shutdowns, floods and closures?
Life is getting more expensive. Are the arts being supported in this straitened economic context? Are people buying books, attending the theatre and supporting our critical and creative writers in the same financial way as they did before the pandemic?
How, in short, are we all feeling in 2023?
We invite you to join us in a range of live, in-person events at UQ’s beautiful St Lucia campus across the year to recover with us.
On April 29th, we’ll host an industry roundtable that brings together Queensland’s arts leaders to tackle the range of questions I posed above. We’ll have publishers, arts policy makers, creative and artistic directors and booksellers joining us – with you – in conversation during UQ’s Book Week, when the campus comes alive with people who love reading and writing.
Then in May we host our marquee event for 2023. Our stated mission at the CCCW is to make UQ the best place in Australia to become a writer or to think critically about writing that makes a difference in the world. What better way to aspire – and seek inspiration – than to bring the Miles Franklin Award winner to campus? We’re so excited to announce that Jennifer Down, author of Bodies of Light, will be joining us live in conversation to talk about what recovery means for her. Event details and bookings – it will be a glam drinks-and-canapes affair – will be posted soon on our website in the ‘Events’ section.
Then, as this year’s Miles Franklin Award shortlist is announced shortly after Jennifer’s visit, we’ll invite our critical and creative writers on staff here at the School of Communication and Arts to review the novels that have been deemed 2023’s best, and will host these responses on our website as part of our new Miles Franklin Shadow Jury event.
In November, we finish our year of recovery off with a tangential bit of fun. Join us at a special Friday research forum as we celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary with a range of critical papers that riff of notions of regeneration and reinvention.
We’ll post details of all of these events as they’re locked in. Keep checking our ‘News’ and ‘Events’ pages on the website.
We hope you find inspiration in our literary line-up for 2023. We’d love to see you in person as we put the figurative and literal ‘iso’ years behind us.
