BEHRENDT-&-BURNSIDEMelbourne Writers Festival 2013

Friday 23 August 10:00am AEST

Censorship Today

Keynote: Larissa Behrendt joined by John Burnside
Chair: Ali Alizadeh


Author Biographies:

Prof. Larissa Behrendt is the Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has published numerous textbooks on Indigenous legal issues. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and a founding member of the Australian Academy of Law. Her most recent book is Indigenous Australia for Dummies.  Larissa wrote and directed the feature film, Innocence Betrayed.

Larissa won the 2002 David Uniapon Award and a 2005 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for her novel Home. Her second novel, Legacy, was released in October 2009.  Larissa is Chair of the Bangarra Dance Theatre and a board member of NSW Museums and Galleries. She is the Ambassador of the Guwara Aboriginal Campus at St. Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney and a board member of the Sydney Story Factory, a literacy program in Redfern. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year.

John Burnside‘s last two books were the novel, A Summer of Drowning, shortlisted for the 2001 Costa Prize, and his poetry collection, Black Cat Bone, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His latest book is Something Like Happy.