Crime With Wine Vol. 3: Tanya Scott, Lisa Ellery, Sara Foster, Dawn Farnham

A crime fuelled conversation with our friends Sisters in Crime WA, hosted by Dawn Farnham & featuring Tanya Scott, Lisa Ellery, Sara Foster.

Books in the Brewery have partnered with our friends at Sisters in Crime WA to bring you this special edition of Crime With Wine, hosted by Dawn Farnham and featuring Tanya Scott, Lisa Ellery, Sara Foster.

Come, sit, sip your wine and be entertained at the third Books in the Brewery celebration of crime fiction featuring four Sisters in Crime from across the crime writing spectrum.

Our guest authors will be discussing their new books and all things crime - favourite detectives, must watch TV (was it only me who binged Lincoln Lawyer season 4?), inspiration for their novels, writing insights, and best way to murder somebody (on the page, honest!) followed by the opportunity for audience questions and book signings thanks to the incomparable team at Boundless Books.

Seating will be cabaret style at tables. Dinner service will be available from the bar.

Approx times:

6pm - Doors open

645pm - Panel discussion & readings

815pm - Book sales, signings, photo ops

Tanya Scott

Tanya Scott is an Australian writer, doctor and educator. She is an accomplished survivor of near misses, including escaping from an engineering degree out of high school, crashing a car with a huntsman on her lap and getting caught in a rip while swimming off the Cocos Islands. She also managed to finish medical school with her sense of humour intact.

Over a varied medical career, she has learned more from her patients than from any textbook – not just about physical and mental health, but about humanity, resilience and the absurdity of life. While these themes inform her writing, her love of twisty mysteries has made her an accidental crime writer.

Lisa Ellery

Lisa Ellery was born in 1975 and raised on a farm near Esperance on Western Australia’s south coast. She studied law and arts at the University of Western Australia before returning to regional WA in 1998 to commence her career as a lawyer in the goldmining city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. She soon fell in love with Kal and its people, and in 2008 she started her own law firm there, working predominantly in commercial and mining law. Her debut novel, Private Prosecution, was published by Fremantle Press in 2021 and followed by Hot Ground in 2025 after Lisa sold her law practice to scale back her non-writing commitments. She is married to Simon Ellery, a geologist. She continues to live in Kalgoorlie and divides her time between the law, running and writing.

Sara Foster

Sara Foster writes page-turning psychological suspense thrillers with strong female leads. Her latest novel, When She Was Gone (2025), begins when an au pair and two small children vanish from a remote Australian beach, and is a race-against-time thriller, exploring themes around misogyny, wealth, power and control.

Sara is also the author of the acclaimed dystopian thriller The Hush and seven more bestselling psychological suspense stories: The Deceit (novella), You Don't Know Me, The Hidden Hours, All That is Lost Between Us, Shallow Breath, Beneath the Shadows and Come Back to Me. Two of her novels have been optioned for television, and You Don't Know Me was adapted into a chart-topping drama podcast series by Listnr. Sara has a PhD in creative writing (studying maternal representations in fiction) and lives in Perth, Western Australia, with her husband, two daughters, three cats, Luna the cavoodle and Sunny the bearded dragon.

Dawn Farnham

Dawn is a feminist academic researcher and writer who strives to bring the stories of erased or forgotten women and their role in history to centre stage. She called Singapore home for twelve years during which time she made lasting friendships, was a volunteer guide for the city’s museums, began her fiction-writing career and found publication. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and now lives in Perth.

She has published five novels, including The Straits Quartet, four novels set in nineteenth century colonial Singapore (2007-2013); and Finding Maria, a mystery set during Singapore’s post-war race riots (2017) which was shortlisted for the Penang Monthly Literary Prize (2018). Her short stories have featured in anthologies in Southeast Asia and Australia. In 2013 she won the Melbourne Athenaeum Library Short Story Prize. She also writes for stage and screen and won the NexGen Short Film Festival Prize in Perth for her screenplay The Wallpaper. Tokyo Time was published by USA-based publisher Brash Books in 2023 and in 2025 her manuscript, Shadowlands, set in outback WA and post-war Japan, was recently shortlisted for The Australian Fiction Prize.