Tegan Bennett Daylight - The Details - with Charlotte Wood

Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books – as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader. Reading has been her inspiration and solace, her recreation and profession, her poison and her medicine.

In The Details, a deeply intimate and insightful memoir, Daylight describes how her rich storehouse of reading has nourished her life, and how her life informs her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection – the details - that really matter: what we see when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we fall in love, when we make friends. The details are what we can share and compare and carry with us. 

Tegan discusses all this with acclaimed author Charlotte Wood via Zoom. 

Event tickets are just $5. Or you can select an Event+Book combo ticket for $26.99 - a saving of $5. The Zoom meeting details form part of your ticket, emailed to you after registration. 

About the Book

In this deeply intimate and insightful work, Daylight describes how her rich storehouse of reading has nourished her life, and how her life informs her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection – the details - that really matter: what we see when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we fall in love, when we make friends. The details are what we can share and compare and carry with us. 

Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother’s last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay ‘Vagina’); her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders; and her great loves and friendships. 

Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from ‘real life’ but a richer engagement with the business of living. The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.

Praise

"Daylight is simply a superb writer. Her prose is supple, discursive, funny, restrained and loving. Like all great art, The Details is about many things at once: among them birth and death, laughter and misery, mothers and children, the body and the spirit – and informing and transforming all this, of course, it is about reading and the creation of a sustaining inner life. It reminds us that in life as in writing, it’s the illuminating detail that reveals the truth of who we are. If you love reading, you’ll cherish this book for showing you why."  - Charlotte Wood, author of The Weekend and The Natural Way of Things.

About the Author

Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic. She is the author of three novels: Bombora, What Falls Away and Safety, as well as several books for children and teenagers. Her collection of short stories, Six Bedrooms, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2016. She works as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing.

About the Moderator

Charlotte Wood has been described as 'one of our most original and provocative writers'. She is the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her bestselling novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Indie Book Award for Fiction, was joint winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, and was published throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and North America. 

She has been twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, as well as many others for this and previous works. Her non-fiction books include The Writer's Room, a collection of interviews with authors about the creative process, and Love & Hunger, a book about cooking. Her latest novel, The Weekend, is currently longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. She lives in Sydney with her husband.