Author Talk: EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End

Join writers Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz for a sharp, funny dive into EXCLUSIVE!, an anthology from Melbourne’s cult longform newsletter, The Paris End. Together they explore the city’s quirks, questions and contradictions in a collection as irreverent, intimate and alive as the place itself.

About Cameron Hurst:

Cameron Hurst is a writer and art historian. Her writing has appeared in publications including Memo Review, HEAT, Gusher, Artlink, and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art. She co-edited Venus in Tullamarine: Art, Sex, Politics and Norman Lindsay (Index Press, 2023). She is a co-founder of The Paris End, a weekly longform newsletter of society and culture based in Melbourne. EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End will be published by Giramondo in November 2025.

About Sally Olds:

Sally Olds is a writer from Queensland living in Narrm/Melbourne. Her work has been published in Sydney Review of Books, un Magazine, AQNB, and by the Powerhouse Museum, the Institute of Modern Art, and more. Her first book, a collection of essays titled People who Lunch, was published in 2022. She is a co-founder of The Paris End, a weekly longform newsletter of society and culture based in Melbourne. EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End will be published by Giramondo in November 2025.

About Oscar Schwartz:

Oscar Schwartz is a writer and journalist. His reporting and criticism have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and Sydney Review of Books. His poetry has been published in Best Australian Poems, the Age, Cordite and international journals. His debut collection, The Honeymoon Stage, was shortlisted for the 2018 Queensland Literary Prize for Poetry. He is a co-founder of The Paris End, a weekly longform newsletter of society and culture based in Melbourne. EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End will be published by Giramondo in November 2025.

About the publication:

An anthology from the longform email newsletter The Paris End, read by thousands every week, in which three young writers together explore the cultural mores, highlights and backwaters of contemporary Melbourne.

A few years ago, Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz sat down for a beer at a Melbourne pub and decided to start a newsletter. It would be called The Paris End, after the aspirationally cosmopolitan (yet persistently grotty) hilltop at the eastern end of Melbourne’s city centre. It would seek to make much of a striving metropolis. It would publish hyperlocal, irreverent, long-form literary journalism – a dirty martini and a good gossip in email form.

EXCLUSIVE! brings together a selection of nineteen lively essays from the first years of The Paris End, each illustrated by house cartoonist, Aaron Billings. Hurst, Olds and Schwartz take you into corset-making studios, art fairs, micro-dairies, apartment developments, university pubs, biohacking spas, court rooms, and the musty offices of the city’s Lacanian psychoanalysts. They ask urgent questions, such as: Can the male lesbian speak? Would you want to live forever if you had to live in Docklands? How does one emulate Frank Moorhouse’s financial ability to stay fed with caviar, and watered with champagne?

In this anthology, three distinct voices collaborate to mythologise a time and place, making Melbourne feel as worthy of attention as London, New York or Berlin.

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