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Michelle de Kretser: Theory & Practice

The author discusses the presence of Virginia Woolf in her most personal novel to date, an account of desire and jealousy, in conversation with Francesca Wade.

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Author Michelle de Kretser wearing a flowery dress with an image of a fox on it.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s unfulfilled ambition to write a novel combining fiction and essay, the celebrated Australian author, Michelle de Kretser interlaces these forms with a sliver of memoir in a novel of exhilarating effect, charged with truth.

Set in the mid-1980s, a young Sri Lankan-Australian woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. ‘Beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air, yet the gap between theory and practice proves treacherous. A love affair spirals into obsession, while a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ into disarray.

Michelle de Kretser makes and unmakes fiction as we read, uncovering what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and emigrated to Australia as a teenager. She was educated in Melbourne and Paris. She is the author of six other novels, most recently Scary Monsters, which won the 2023 Folio Prize. She has also won the Miles Franklin Award (twice) and has been longlisted for both the Booker and Orange Prize. She lives in Sydney.

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020), which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Granta and other places.

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Age guidance
For ages 16+

For your visit

This event is held at the Purcell Room Southbank Centre

The Purcell Room is located in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is open from 90 minutes before events start until they finish. It’s closed at all other times.

Concrete interior of Purcell Room entrance at Southbank Centre View larger image

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The Purcell Room is an auditorium located within our Queen Elizabeth Hall.

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