Katerina Gibson in-conversation with Debra Adelaide

What brings six very different people together? Fiona is a millennial media writer; Sidney a failed poet; Tomas a thirty-something factory worker and father; Lexi a fading activist icon; Govita a non-binary visual artist; Henry a Vietnam veteran ageing out in rural isolation. On the face of it, they have nothing in common – but when a tweet goes viral, it sends their lives ricocheting off each other and upending their assumptions about each other, the world they live in, their pasts and their futures.

Following her acclaimed collection of stories, Women I Know, Katerina Gibson’s debut novel demonstrates her extraordinary range of sympathy and interest. Compelling and discursive, ironic and serious, compassionate and ethically rigorous, The Temperaturedescribes our fragmented society as it tries to absorb the significance of climate change, social media, shifting boundaries in gender and sexuality, and deepening gaps between generations. The Temperature is about whether we can learn, personally and collectively; about the cyclical nature of grief, catastrophe and revelation. It is a novel about how we might live through the end of the world.

A contemporary equivalent of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity or Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, The Temperaturemarks Katerina Gibson out as one of the most ambitious, engaging and significant of our emerging writers.

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Katerina Gibson was born in 1994. She is a writer and a bookseller living in Naarm. Her stories have appeared in Granta, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Island Online, Going Down Swinging, the Meanjin blog andKill Your Darlings'New Australian Fiction 2020 anthology. Her short story 'Fertile Soil' was the Pacific regional winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Katerina is a 2021 Felix Meyer Scholar and a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist 2023. Her short story collection Women I Know won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2023.

Dr Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of 18 books, including fiction, non-fiction, edited collections and reference works. Her 2018 novel, The Household Guide to Dying, was published to acclaim in Australia and around the world, and was short- and long-listed for several literary awards, including the former international Orange Prize, now the Women’s Prize, for fiction.  Other fiction includes Letter to George Clooney (2013), which was shortlisted for the Nita B. Kibble Award, The Women’s Pages (2015), and Zebra (2019), winner of the short story category in the Queensland Literary Awards. Debra Adelaide taught creative writing for 20 years and is now an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney.