Margaret Hickey: Stone Town Book Launch

Margaret Hickey is an award-winning author and playwright from North East Victoria. As someone who has, for the majority of her life lived in small rural towns, Margaret has a deep affection for those who live outside city walls. The focus of her PhD was on depictions of landscape in Australian literature and this is evident in her writing which always keeps the land as the compelling lens through which everything else occurs. Cutters End was her debut crime novel.

Stone Town is Margaret Hickey’s tensely plotted and engrossingly atmospheric follow up to her best-selling crime debut Cutters End. Margaret highlights the tension between big city and small town, drawing from people’s growing desire to move regional and the rising percentage of people priced out of the city, which over the last two years has been exacerbated by the pandemic and multiple lockdowns. In doing so she heightens the claustrophobia of the novel, where old alliances hold fast and newcomers are looked upon with suspicion. Margaret’s writing is a masterclass in rural noir. While Cutters End depicted a vivid desert landscape, in Stone Town Margaret has turned her hand to the Australian bushland in the middle of the rainy season, creating an equally eerie and stunning backdrop.

Joining Margaret in conversation is award-winning stand-up comedian and author, Benjamin Stevenson. Benjamin has sold out live shows from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival all the way to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has appeared on ABC TV, Channel 10 and The Comedy Channel. His first novel, Greenlight, was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction, and his second novel, Either Side of Midnight, was shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Original Paperback. Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, his third novel, was a huge bestseller and has been sold in over twenty territories around the world. It will soon be adapted into a major HBO TV series.

RSVP is a must, so to not miss out on a seat.

6:15pm arrival for a 6:30pm start