Book Launches 2016 

Damned Whores and God’s Police
Anne Summers
UNSW Press 2016

​Festival Soirée
Friday 16 September 2016
5.00-7.00pm
 

​In 1975 Anne Summers published Damned Whores and God’s Police, a landmark work that has been one of the most influential bestsellers of the past 40 years. Now, 41 years later, we are celebrating the release of this new, updated edition, which is as insightful and relevant as ever as Anne discusses the extent to which Australian women’s lives have changed for the better and what remains to be done to achieve full equality.

Dr Anne Summers

​Anne is a journalist and author. Her books include The Misogyny Factor (2013), The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love (2009, 2010), On Luck (2009), The End of Equality (2003), Ducks on the Pond (1999), Gamble for Power (1983), Her-Story: Australian Women in Print (1980). In 1987 in New York she was editor-in-chief of the American feminist magazine Ms. She ran the federal Office of Status of Women from 1983-86. In 1989 she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for services to journalism and women. In 1975 her book Damned Whores and God’s Police changed the way women were perceived. It has been republished in 2016. 

Professor Lyndall Ryan

Lyndall has held positions in Australian Studies and Women's Studies at Griffith University and Flinders University and was Foundation Professor of Australian Studies and Head of School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle. She is currently Research Professor in the Centre for History of Violence in Humanities Research Institute at the University of Newcastle. Her Ph.D thesis (1975) was Aborigines in Tasmania, 1800–1974 and their problems with the Europeans. Her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians presented a critical interpretation of the early history of relations between Tasmanian Aborigines and white settlers in Tasmania. A second edition was published in 1996. Her work was attacked by Keith Windschuttle to which she responded in an essay Who is the fabricator? in Robert Manne's Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2003).

Fragments
Antigone Kefala
96pp, ISBN 9781 925336 191
(Giramondo, 2016)

Festival Symposium
Saturday 17 September 2016
12.10-12.40pm
Online bookings are now open
​
Antigone Kefala is one of the finest of the older generation of Australian poets, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of her minimalism, and the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragments is her first collection of new poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of her New and Selected Poems in 1998. It follows her prose work Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008), of which one critic wrote, ‘Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it’. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, though the territory is often darker now, as the poet patrols the liminal spaces between life and death, alert to the energies which lie in wait there.

Antigone Kefela

​Antigone Kefala is one of the finest of the older generation of Australian poets, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of her minimalism, and the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragments is her first collection of new poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of her New and Selected Poems in 1998. It follows her prose work Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008), of which one critic wrote, ‘Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it’. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, though the territory is often darker now, as the poet patrols the liminal spaces between life and death, alert to the energies which lie in wait there. 

Efi Hatzimanolis

Efi Hatzimanolis, a writer and independent scholar, was a founding member of the Communication and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Wollongong. She has lectured in Textual Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney; in Australian Literature at the University of Wollongong; and in Gender Studies, at the University of New South Wales. She was a founding editor of Xtext, an internationally refereed Feminist journal in cultural theory and minority women’s writing and art. Her short stories have been published in the anthologies Mothers from The Edge (Owl Publishing, 2006), and Fathers from the Edge (Owl Publishing, 2015), and her poetry is published in Southern Sun, Aegean Light (Arcadia, 2011). She is a contributor to Project 366, a poem-centric online collaboration of poets and artists and her most recent poetry and photography is published online in the wonder book of poetry.