Author talk with Anne Casey-Hardy

About the book

Excitable girls rush out to meet life; what could go wrong? A masterful debut about the terrifying thrills of innocence from a voice of experience. Teenagers sneak out to the creek for a wild New Year's Eve party. A sleep-deprived woman who imagines she is pregnant to a Viking faces her scathing sixteen-year-old self. A woman in love wakes up in a van Gogh painting. These gem-like stories are about the desire to rush out and meet life; about getting in over your head; about danger, and damage, and what it means to survive – and not always survive – the risk of being young. They chart the borderlands between girls and women, daughters and mothers, freedom and fear. Emerging fully-formed and singing songs of both innocence and experience, Anne Casey-Hardy is the rarest of new voices: at the same time reckless and entirely in control; funny and frightening; wise and full-blooded.

About Anne

Anne Casey-Hardy was born in Fremantle and grew up in Melbourne as the eldest of seven children. She won the 2018 Peter Carey Short Story Award, was shortlisted for the 2019 VU/Overland Short Story Prize and was awarded a 2021 Varuna Residential Fellowship. Her short stories and poetry have been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Island Magazine, Overland Journal, Westerly Magazine and several anthologies. Anne has previously worked as a research librarian and advocate for families of premature babies, and her work in this area has been published in The Lancet, Journal of Neonatology and Journal of Paediatric and Child Health. She lives with her husband in Melbourne's west, on Bunurong land.

About Tegan

Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic. She is the author of three novels: Bombora, What Falls Away and Safety, as well as several books for children and teenagers. Her collection of short stories, Six Bedrooms, was published in July 2015, and shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal, the Steele Rudd Award and the 2016 Stella Prize. Her book of essays, The Details, was published by Scribner in July 2020. She works as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing, and lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney with her husband and two children.