SPECIAL EVENT - The Australian/ Vogel Literary Award 2021 Winner, Emma Batchelor in-conversation

Emma Batchelor is 2021 winner of The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award for her novel Now That I See You.  one of Australia's richest and the most prestigious award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five. 

Offering prize money of $20,000 plus publication by Allen & Unwin with an advance against royalties, The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award has launched the careers of some of Australia's most successful writers, including Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Gillian Mears, Brian Castro, Mandy Sayer and Andrew McGahan.

The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award-winning authors have gone on to win or be shortlisted for other major awards, such as the Miles Franklin Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Booker Prize.

The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award winner will be appearing in conversation with Better Read Than Dead's very own Madeleine Gray.

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About the Book:

Now That I See You details the breakdown of a long-term relationship after one partner discloses to the other that they are transgender. This piece of autofiction is told from the perspective of a female narrator over a period of eighteen months, spanning the first discovery of unknown feminine hairs in her male partner’s bathroom—through Jess’s transition from presenting as male to female, and then to the relationship’s eventual disintegration.

Personal journal entries and letters to Jess allow readers inside an uncomfortably intimate but poignant exploration of identity, gender, sexuality, love, partnership, grief and mental health. Now That I See You is split into three parts: Us, Them and Me, each with a different area of focus—the relationship and how it is impacted by Jess’s disclosure, Jess and the beginnings of their transition, and the narrator and her attempts to put herself back together.

About the Author:

Emma Batchelor is a writer and author from Canberra, Australia. After completing a Bachelor of Medical Science (Hons) at the Australian National University and taking many gap years to work and travel, she eventually embraced her desire to write about gender issues, societal analysis and fashion. Emma lives part time with her partner Jesse and full time with her cat Luna. 

Now That I See You is her first novel.

About the Moderator:

Madeleine Gray is a freelance arts critic and writer from Sydney. She has an MSt with Distinction from the University of Oxford, where her thesis was on erotic female friendships and anti-neoliberal temporalities in the fiction of Sally Rooney, Deborah Levy, and Ali Smith. That thesis is now published as a journal article in Contemporary Women’s Writing. In 2019 she was an Emerging Critics Fellow for the Sydney Review of Books, where she wrote on work by Bri Lee, Sam George-Allen, Kate Richards, and Julienne van Loon, among others. She is now half way through a PhD in contemporary women’s autobiographical literary theory with the University of Manchester, but is based in Sydney for Covid reasons.

Madeleine has written literary criticism for a range of national and international publications, from The Lifted Brow to the TLS. She has recently written on Ali Smith’s Summer and on Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts for The Monthly; on gender, genius and The Queen’s Gambit for The Saturday Paper; and on Raven Leilani’s Luster, inter-generational affair novels, race, sex and power in Overland. She has upcoming work in the Good Weekend, Electric Literature, and The Monthly. You can find more of her work here: https://madeleine-gray.com/home/portfolio-2/.