Gunflower: Laura Jean McKay in-conversation with James Bradley

Gunflower is the brilliant new short story collection from the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of The Animals in That Country.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humour, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerising ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

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

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) — winner of The Arthur C. Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year, and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013). She was awarded the NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honours in 2022.

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean, and his essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Weekend Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. He lives in Sydney.