Book Launch: FIG by Dael Allison

Come along and help celebrate the launch of local author Dael Allison's new book: Fig.

Fig trees flower within their own fruit, isn’t that the ultimate form of protection? Newcastle is a regional city where people have proven again and again that they are prepared to fight for what they need to protect. From iconic fig trees to the planet, from workers rights to protecting vulnerable children and even saving oneself, sometimes that protection takes a long time coming. And sometimes it fails. In these linked stories Dael Allison explores how being prepared to fight to protect what you believe in builds a strong, resilient, rich community.

Dael will be in conversation with her daughter Pippa about Fig, as well as regional writing more generally.

Finger food and a glass of wine are included.

Dael Allison

Dael Allison has won awards for poetry, the Byron Writer’s Festival/Varuna Award for an Unpublished novel and the International Wildcare Prize for Environmental Writing. She was awarded three residencies at Varuna and a Wildcare residency at Maria Island, Tasmania. Poems from her MA in creative writing (UTS) were published in Fairweather’s Raft (Walleah Press, 2012), and featured in an ABC Poetica soundscape. Her PhD in creative writing from the University of Newcastle, 2025, produced the linked story cycle Fig, Puncher & Wattmann, 2026. Her pocketbook of poetry Blimmin’ Wimmin was published by Flying Islands Press at the end of 2025.