Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks will be visiting the National Library of Australia in October. While she is here, she will give two major lectures: the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture and the Kenneth Binns Lecture, the keynote address at the Library’s conference ‘The Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination’.
The Library is delighted that she has agreed to deliver the inaugural Ray Mathew Lecture. The free public lecture, to be held at 6pm on Thursday 22 October 2009, is supported by the Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust. It is the Library’s intention that the lecture will be given annually by an Australian living abroad. It is named in honour of the Australian poet and playwright, Ray Mathew, who left Australia in the late 1960s, never to return. Mathew spent most of the remainder of his life—he died in 2002—living in the New York apartment of his patrons, Eva and Paul Kollsman. The Ray Mathew and Eva Kollsman Trust is a generous bequest, made to the Library by Eva Kollsman, to support and promote the work of contemporary Australian writers. Brooks’ lecture will, fittingly, be ‘The Opportunity of Distance’.
Brooks will also give a second lecture while in Canberra. On Saturday 24 October, she will give the Kenneth Binns Lecture, the keynote address at the major National Library conference, The Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination. In her lecture ‘Hearing Voices and Other Close Encounters with the Dead’, Brooks will explore how a historical novelist captures the voices of the past, especially those who have been marginalised by history. In discussing her journey ‘in search of the lost’, Brooks will set the scene for two days of discussion about the journey from inspiration to publication. Twenty of Australia’s best writers, including Alex Miller, Rodney Hall, Andrea Goldsmith, Judy Horacek and Peter Goldsworthy, will join Brooks to explore the joys and challenges of the creative process.
More information:
- Read an expanded version of this story in Gateways
- Find out about the Ray Mathew Lecture, 6pm, 22 October 2009
- Find out about the conference Flight of the Mind: Writing and the Creative Imagination, Saturday and Sunday, 24 and 25 October 2009
- Buy Geraldine Brooks’s books online

