Growing Up Indian in Australia Launch

Growing Up Indian in Australia reflects and celebrates this vibrant diversity. It features contributions from Australian-Indian writers, both established and emerging, who hail from a wide range of backgrounds, religions and experiences. This colourful, energetic anthology offers reflections on identity, culture, family, food and expectations, ultimately revealing deep truths about both Australian and Indian life.

Our event space is wheelchair accessible via a stair lift. Please contact events@betterread.com.au with any additional access requirements and/or questions.

Aarti Betigeri is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and former foreign correspondent, born in Melbourne to parents from Maharashtra and Karnataka. After an early career as a radio and television news presenter and producer with SBS and the ABC, she moved to India to fulfill a long-held dream to report on South Asia, and lived in New Delhi for almost a decade. Currently, she works as a journalist and advisor focusing on international relations. Her name is surprisingly easy to pronounce.

Jeremy Fernandez is an Australian journalist and television news presenter with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). He is currently weeknight presenter of ABC News NSW in Sydney.

Sharon Verghis was born in Malaysia, and comes from a features-journalism background, with her work appearing in The Weekend Australian, Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald, Time, The Guardian, BBC.com, SBS and many other publications. She finished a law degree in 2023, is a mother of biracial twins and currently works as a research manager for a national company.

Michelle D'Souza Cahill is of Indian heritage and lives in Sydney. Her short stories Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo, 2016) won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and was on several shortlists. Her novel Daisy and Woolf (Hachette, 2022) was longlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the Voss Literary Prize. She is a Hedberg Writer in Residence at the University of Tasmania.

Kishor Napier-Raman is a Sydney-based journalist and writer.

Kavita Bedford is an Australian-Indian writer with a background in media, anthropology and literature. Her first novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, was published in 2021 in the USA, Italy and Australia and was shortlisted for the Queensland and NSW Premiers’ Literary Awards and Small Press Network’s Book of the Year, 2021.

Nicholas Brown is an Australian-Indian actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer and songwriter.