Norman Swan at Montalto

"Exercise is like a vacuum cleaner for aging tissue and renews your tissue. You can look at the biopsy of muscle and your muscle is frail and old. After you've done weight training, your muscle is indistinguishable from a young person's." Norman Swan With a career spanning over thirty years as a r…

Geraldine Brooks at Montalto

"Mark Twain said, fiction must be plausible, truth needn't be, or words to that effect. And truth is, it's so much more unlikely. And so everything in this book that seems unlikely, those are the true things." – Geraldine Brooks. Geraldine Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist…

Stephanie Alexander at Montalto

What better way to celebrate Stephanie Alexander’s latest cookbook, Home, than with an intimate conversation at award-winning restaurant and winery Montalto. Hear Alexander reflect on her unparalleled five-decade career as a cook, writer and restaurateur, and the legacy she has built for generatio…

Charlotte Wood

How do we maintain friendships as we age? How do these friendships impact who we are – or who we become? And … exactly how should we grow old? Charlotte Wood asks these questions of aging and friendship in her highly-anticipated new novel, The Weekend – about three women in their 70s who gather to …

Andrea Goldsmith

How do we become estranged from ourselves – and from the people and places that have moulded us? What’s the way back? And how can we begin again? These questions are at the heart of the new book from award-winning writer Andrea Goldsmith. Invented Lives is about a young Russian-Jewish woman who ar…

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is among Australia’s finest living writers. A poet, activist and academic, as well as an acclaimed novelist and short-story writer, Birch’s writing is concerned with Australians, especially Indigenous Australians, living life on the fringes. He writes, too, about the dark shadow cast by …

Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a familiar figure on the BBC as well as a professor at Columbia University, and he’s produced multi-volume histories of Britain, documentaries with momentous names like The American Futureand a TV series called Simon Schama’s Power of Art. He's a heavyweight scholar, best known for …

Rick Morton

One Hundred Years of Dirt – Rick Morton’s unflinching memoir – tells of growing up on a cattle station in Queensland: of witnessing a horrific accident befall his brother; his father’s alcoholism; his mother’s strength. It’s a story of poverty, drug addiction, cruelty, anger and tragedy; of love an…

Meg and Tom Keneally

Tom and Meg Keneally are an unlikely crack novel-writing team who write about an unlikely crack murder-investigation team. Tom Keneally is an icon of Australian literature: a Booker Prize-winner, a Miles Franklin-winner, and the author of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schindler’s Ark and other c…

Jock Serong

Jock Serong is known as an author of gripping books about crime and catastrophe. His stories spark and seethe with tense emotional and political detail, often drawing on his other skills – in law, and in surf writing. He’s won wide critical acclaim for Quota, On the Java Ridge and The Rules of Back…