Author Talk: Margaret Hickey

Join us for a morning with award-winning author Margaret Hickey talking about her latest novel, An Ill Wind. Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided. Copies of An Ill Wind will be available to purchase on the day and have signed.

About the Book:

A SMALL TOWN DIVIDED. SECRETS BLOWN APART.

High on a hill above the small fictional Victorian town of Carrabeen, 300 wind turbines constantly spin.

All except for one, now deadly still with a limp body hanging from one of its huge white blades.

Married Detective Sergeants Belinda Burney and Will Lovell are shocked to discover the dead man is Geordie Pritchard, a wealthy local philanthropist and owner of the wind energy farm. Suicide at first seems the likely explanation, until Geordie’s widow Lucinda insists her husband was murdered – and she has the death threats to prove it.

The controversies surrounding the arrival of the wind farm has ripped the rural town in two. Some welcome the jobs and prosperity it brings, others are enraged by the loss of farming land. So in the eyes of the locals, Pritchard was both saint and sinner. But who in this small community hated him enough to want him dead?

The natural Australian landscape is the centrepiece of all Margaret’s writing, and the focus of her creative writing PhD was on depictions of landscape in Australian literature. She has always been struck by the isolation and danger, as well as the beauty and exhilaration of her local surrounds and this is evident in An Ill Wind as we spend time in the dusty and quiet paddocks of Carrabeen.

In previous books she has depicted the harsh, relentless desert, the secretive, sodden bush, Australia’s ethereal underwater world and the mountainous High Country of North East Victoria where she lives.

About the Author:

Margaret Hickey is an award-winning author and playwright from North East Victoria. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and is deeply interested in rural lives and communities. She is the author of the bestsellers Cutters End, Stone Town, Broken Bay and The Creeper. Her collection of short stories about country life, Rural Dreams, was released in January 2025.