Louise Southerden in-conversation with Helen O'Neill

Tiny is a memoir by award-winning travel writer Louise Southerden about her quest to create a simpler way of life by building her very own tiny house. In her successful career as a travel writer, Louise found herself staying in ever new and exotic locations, but while staying in a tiny house in Norway, she had an epiphany about what she truly wanted for her life, ready to put down roots. With no prior building experience, Louise undertook the build with her partner, Max, which tested an already unstable relationship. 

Over the year and a half of planning and construction of her tiny house, Louise witnessed her new home coming together as her relationship was falling apart. Alongside her burgeoning construction skills, Louise learned about love, home, forgiveness and what we really need to be happy.  This is an intensely personal story about searching for home and true love, two of life’s most fundamental needs, risking everything, failing and finding ways to cope, and discovering that what we need isn’t always what we thought we wanted.

Our event space is wheelchair accessible via a stair lift. For any other accessibility questions, please email events@betterread.com.au.

Louise Southerden is an Australian author and awardwinning travel writer with a passion for living close to nature and travelling as simply and sustainably as possible. Originally from Sydney, Louise has written four non-fiction books including the world’s first surfing guide for women and now lives in a tiny house in northern NSW. Tiny (Hardie Grant Explore) is her first memoir.

Helen O’Neill is an award-winning journalist and author whose books are published in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK. Her non-fiction books include Daffodil: The biography of a flower, A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler, and Florence Broadhurst – Her secret and extraordinary lives. A former staff journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian and Vogue Australia, Helen has worked on documentaries that have screened across the world, and has served as a director on the boards of the Australian Society of Authors and Copyright Agency.