Sophie, Standing There | Meg Mason in Conversation
Location
Hosted by
Fullers Bookshop
About
Sophie Pattison is such a lovely person. Warm, kind, amazingly positive. She works as a freelance sound technician for literary festivals. She is a massive reader and was recently forced to move house. She is bracingly lonely.* So much so, the absence of others feels like a physical weight, if that makes sense. But then Sophie discovers an author through work, and comes to adore her. Her books, interviews and podcasts, her wisdom and brilliance, her beautiful words. It's like solace and company. It's almost like love. And Sophie would love to meet her, although she never will, obviously. The author would never come to her festival. She's too famous for that. Too brilliant, too beautiful. And in a way, thank goodness, because that would change everything. Sophie's entire life.
But ... what if she did?
* although she has a best friend called Emma, and an amazing brother. And a husband. But a number of things happened there.
Meg Mason is the author of Sorrow and Bliss, which became an international bestseller after it was first published in Australia. Winner of the British Book Industry Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, it has since been translated into more than 30 languages. Her first career was in journalism, beginning at the Times of London, later writing for Vogue, Elle, GQ, Sunday Style, and The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts and Murmurs. Born in New Zealand, she lives in Sydney with her husband and two daughters.
Keely Jobe is a writer of fiction and nonfiction living on the east coast of Lutruwita/Tasmania with her partner and two staffies. Her work has appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Australian Geographic, and Cosmos. She has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tasmania and is the nonfiction editor at Island Magazine. The Endling is her first novel.
Join Meg and Keely at the Afterword Cafe.