June 24

A conversation with

Kate Holden

Maleny Community Centre

6 for 6.30pm,

Tickets $30 and $20 for students

Bookings essential

And, Introducing,

Georgia Harper

Our Introducing author will be Georgia Harper,

Georgia’s first novel What I Would Do to You, won Best Debut Book at the 2025 Davitt Awards and was shortlisted for Best Crime Fiction Debut at the 2025 Danger Awards. Georgia has worked as a psychologist with both serious violent offenders and victim-survivors of crime. She was also the Senior Inspector Prosecutions for RSPCA Queensland.

Her new novel begins after the central eponymous character, Dove, has a violent confrontation with the man next door. In response she paints a daring question on the front wall of her Sunshine Coast hinterland farm: 'What would you do if you had a whole day on earth free of men?'

When tourists and local women answer by writing their pent-up frustrations, fears and confessions, it strikes a nerve with the local blokes. With nowhere to hide from exposed secrets and shameful legacies, tensions rise, just as the town hits the headlines over a missing teen.

Georgia Harper takes a big swing and hits it out of the park. Dove is character-driven crime that asks deep philosophical questions but refuses to offer simple answers. Ambitious, wry and deftly drawn - I loved it.
JP Pomare

Thought-provoking, nuanced and utterly original, Dove is a gripping exploration of power and gender set against the backdrop of 1990s small town Queensland. Georgia Harper’s charismatic, unconventional heroine will stay with me for a long time.
Kate Horan

In The Ruin of Magic, Kate Holden presents a series of essays that meditate on what it means to make ourselves a home, both individually, and generally, in an Australia which is still finding its way amidst old and avoided truths. She is curious to understand what it means to belong; she writes of her instinctive yearning for a long-ago Europe - engaging in a conversation with many of its most esteemed thinkers and authors from the last century - and how that plays out against the natural attunement she feels for the Australian landscape.

A shimmering book that teases, enchants and provokes while offering balm through language and memory for our modern anguish and fear of oblivion… Robert Dessaix

Elegant and whip-smart, this is a work of beauty - a sober yet joyful quest to find home and belonging… Susan Johnson

Kate Holden is the author of The Winter Road, winner of the 2021 Walkley Book Award and the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction, as well as the two memoirs, In My Skin and The Romantic.

We are delighted to welcome her back to Maleny.

Kate will be in conversation with Steven Lang

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