Livestream: The Library That Made Me

Name: Livestream: The Library That Made Me
Start: 2026-02-24T18:00:00+11:00
End: 2026-02-24T18:00:00+11:00
Location: Theatrette

About

Join us in person for a special livestreamed event from the State Library of NSW to celebrate the launch of the Library’s 200th Anniversary book The Library That Made Me, featuring an illustrious line-up of contributors to the book reflecting on the libraries that shaped them as readers and writers.

From tiny mobile libraries to the grand Mitchell Library, the seriousness of university libraries or the tragedy of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library, hear about how these spaces for reading, creativity and refuge sparked something magical in some of Australia’s finest thinkers.

Bio(s):
Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2023. Her fiction explores dispossession and the creation of community. Her other novels are Song of the Sun God, The Barrier, Safe Haven and Unfinished Business. She lives on Darramuragal Country in Sydney, with her husband and children.

Dr Kate Evans is a radio producer, presenter and critic. She joined ABC Radio National in the 1990s and now specialises in literature as co-host of The Bookshelf since 2018. She appears on TV as a critic and books commentator. She is a regular contributor to the State Library’s quarterly magazine Openbook and contributed a major essay to the book PIX: The magazine that told Australia’s story. She wrote the very first ‘Library that made me’, published in Openbook in Summer 2021.

Grace Karskens is Emeritus Professor of Australian History at the University of New South Wales. Her books include The Colony: A history of early Sydney, which won the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-fiction, and People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History.

Thomas Keneally AO is one of Australia’s most distinguished writers. His first novel was published in 1964 and since then he has written fiction and non-fiction, including The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schindler’s List, The Commonwealth of Thieves and The People’s Train. He has won the Miles Franklin Award, the Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the International Mondello Prize, and has been made a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library.

Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and an award-winning author of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children’s literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu, which won 2016 Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Young Dark Emu. In 2018 he was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Phillipa McGuinness is the editor of Openbook, the State Library of NSW’s quarterly magazine, and the Library’s Lead, Editorial and Publishing. A former non-fiction book publisher, she is the editor of Copyfight, and author of The Year Everything Changed — 2001 and Skin Deep. She is co-editor, with Richard Neville, of The Library That Made Me: 200 Years of the State Library of NSW.

Photographs and video may be taken during this event for use in Council’s online and print communications. By attending, you may appear in event images or recordings. If you do not wish to be photographed or filmed, please inform the photographer or a member of the event team.