Books and Conversation with Vicki Hastrich

Readers – Books and Conversation with Vicki Hastrich
Thursday, October 23 | 8:00 PM

Join us for an evening of storytelling, literary insight and conversation as celebrated Sydney writer Vicki Hastrich takes the stage to discuss her remarkable body of work with host Michaela Kalowski.

Hastrich is the author of the acclaimed memoir Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the Singular Life – described by the Times Literary Supplement as “the literary equivalent of a glass-bottomed boat, a frame for wonderment” – as well as the novels Swimming with the Jellyfish and The Great Arch. Her writing spans the personal and the mythic, the oceanic and the intimate.

Now, in her new biography The Last Days of Zane Grey (2025), she dives into the wild and largely unknown Australian chapters of a Hollywood legend. Zane Grey – global celebrity, millionaire author, and inventor of the Western – came to Australia in the 1930s in pursuit of world-record game fish, adventure, and a secret Australian lover. But behind the glamour was a man desperately trying to hold onto his fortune and fame.

From fishing battles with great white sharks off Port Lincoln to shooting the first-ever shark film on Hayman Island, Grey's escapades are brought vividly to life in Hastrich’s page-turning portrait of obsession, ambition, and survival on the edge of the world.

A tale of oceanic dreams, literary legacies, and untold Australian history, The Last Days of Zane Grey is "utterly absorbing" (Grace Karskens) and "as big as the great white shark that haunted the famous fisherman’s dreams" (Scott Levi, ABC).

Don’t miss this chance to hear from one of Australia’s most thoughtful and original literary voices.

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