Penguin Literary Prize Panel x Avid Reader feat. Imbi Neeme & Kathryn Hind

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Join publisher Meredith Curnow and Penguin Prize winners Imbi Neeme and Kathryn Hind as they discuss this fantastic prize opportunity and the publication of their debut novels with Cass Moriarty.

The Spill: Winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize

In 1982, a car overturns on a remote West Australian road. Nobody is hurt, but the impact is felt for decades.

Nicole and Samantha Cooper both remember the summer day when their mother, Tina, lost control of their car – but not in quite the same way. It is only after Tina’s death, almost four decades later, that the sisters are forced to reckon with the repercussions of the crash. Nicole, after years of aimless drifting, has finally found love, and yet can’t quite commit. And Samantha is hiding something that might just tear apart the life she’s worked so hard to build for herself.

The Spill explores the cycles of love, loss and regret that can follow a family through the years – moments of joy, things left unsaid, and things misremembered. Above all, it is a deeply moving portrait of two sisters falling apart and finding a way to fit back together.

Hitch: Winner of the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize and a Canberra Critics Circle Award

Amelia stands beside a highway in the Australian desert, alone except for her dog and the occasional road train that speeds past her raised thumb.

After her mother’s funeral, Amelia was confronted by Zach and reminded of the relationship they had when she was a teenager. She feels complicit and remains unable to process what happened. So she ran. Her best friend, Sid, is Zach’s cousin and the one person in the world she can depend upon.

But, of course, the road isn’t safe either. Amelia is looking for generosity or human connection in the drivers she finds lifts with, and she does receive that. But she is also let down.

Hitch is a raw exploration of consent and its ambiguities, personal agency and the choices we make. It’s the story of twenty-something Amelia and her dog Lucy hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other, trying to outrun grief and trauma, and moving ever closer to the things she longs to escape.

Imbi Neeme is a recovering blogger, impending novelist and compulsive short story writer. Her manuscript The Spill was awarded the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize. She was also the recipient of the 2019 Henry Handel Richardson Fellowship at Varuna for excellence in Short Story Writing. Her short fiction has won prizes in the 2019 Newcastle Short Story Awards, the 2018 Boroondara Literary Awards, and has been shortlisted for the 2018 Peter Carey Short Story Award.

Her first manuscript, The Hidden Drawer, made the judges’ commended list in the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Awards and was selected for the 2015 Hachette/Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Program.

She blogged for many years at Not Drowning, Mothering, which won the 2010 Bloggies award for best Australian/New Zealand Weblog. She lives in Melbourne with her partner, kids and largely indifferent pets.

Kathryn Hind was born in Canberra and has now returned there after living for five years in the UK. She’s published essays and short stories in various Australian journals and collections, and has had a poem published on one of Canberra’s Action buses. Kathryn began her first novel, Hitch, while studying in the UK, and in 2018 she was awarded the inaugural Penguin Literary Prize for the manuscript.

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