This episode was recorded live at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival on Friday 25 October 2019. It features Claire G. Coleman, Krissy Kneen, Pitchaya Sudbanthad and Michelle Tanmizi.

Speculative fiction has lurked in the shadows of the literary scene for years while realism hogged the limelight. Now, as the natural and political spheres crumble around us, speculative fiction’s dystopian worlds don’t seem so different from our own. In this timely conversation, our panelists ask whether we’re now at the point where all contemporary fiction is in fact speculative fiction.

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral Country is in South Coast Western Australia. Her novel Terra Nullius won a Black&Write! Fellowship and a Norma K Hemming Award, and has been shortlisted for The Stella Prize and an Aurealis Award. The Old Lie is her second novel.

Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of the memoir Affection and five novels including Stella Prize shortlisted An Uncertain Grace. She is also the author of Thomas Shapcott Award-winning poetry collection Eating My Grandmother. She has written and directed documentaries for Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Special Broadcasting Service television.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad is the author of the novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain, published by Riverhead Books (US) and Sceptre (UK). He has received fellowships in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, and currently splits time between Bangkok, Thailand and Brooklyn, USA.

Michelle Tanmizi is Chinese-Indonesian and international. She is an author, leadership coach and trainer, and a motivational speaker. Michelle’s first work was a poetry book, Truth. Late Dawn is her first speculative science fiction novel inspired by the conservation crisis we face today.

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