Panel - Crafting powerful stories of buried pasts, loss and the healing power of love

Family secrets shape entire lives - choosing the voice (s) that will break the silence. - Award winning author Kristina Olsson talks with Sarah Clutton and Paula McLean on the voices they chose.

Crafting powerful stories of buried pasts, loss and the healing power of love - the bonds of love transcend time and circumstance.

The Bookshop of Buried Pasts by Sarah Clutton is an emotive mystery involving complex relationships, loss and deep love all expertly woven through the shelves and pages of two enchanting bookshops. Uplifting, humorous, and at times heartbreaking, it explores how the bonds of love transcend time and circumstance. Spanning continents and decades, her story explores how intergenerational trauma is passed down and how the past and present are forever intertwined.

Sarah Clutton lives in a storybook village in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales on Gundungurra and Tharawal country. She is a refugee advocate, mother and writer of uplifting fiction who has previously dabbled as a judge’s associate, insurance claims supervisor, litigation lawyer, philanthropic foundation manager and ghost-writer. In 2018 she was the national recipient of the Dymocks/McIntosh Commercial Fiction Scholarship. Her bestselling novel The Remarkable Truths of Alfie Bains pays homage to her early years on a farm in Northwest Tasmania. The Bookshop of Buried Pasts, an emotive mystery spanning continents and decades, is her fourth novel.  

In The One Remaining Paula McLean explores the self-healing power of writing our stories. Her protagonist Hilary Mason is a successful novelist who in her fifties embarks on writing her memoir. The memoir documents the trauma and impact of her teenage sister’s disappearance, the secrets she kept, the relationships she repressed. It is also a love story, and it is love and the power of writing her memoir that helps Hilary to overcome loss.  

Paula McLean is immediate past Deputy Chair of the Stella Prize, and Stella’s NSW Ambassador. Amplifying the voice of women has been at the forefront of her work in a career that has spanned book publishing, cultural advocacy and philanthropy. She is a founding trustee of McLean Foundation which supports literature, education, conservation and domestic violence programs. Paula is Patron of Pop In, a domestic violence day centre in the Southern Highlands of NSW, and until earlier this year served as a board member of the Country Education Foundation of Australia. Paula began the Nature Writing Prize, awarded biennially for an essay about the Australian environment and the writer’s response to it. She is a founding member of the She Gives Advisory Group, an initiative to celebrate, connect and inspire women in their giving to accelerate positive social change. In 2021 Paula was awarded Philanthropy Australia’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Her short story submission to the Society of Women Writers NSW was selected for their Centenary edition ofWomen’s Ink – 100 Years, 100 Women, 100 Voices. Paula and her husband split their time between Sydney and the historic village of Berrima in the Southern Highlands. 

Kristina Olsson is an award-winning writer of fiction, non-fiction and journalism. Her 2009 novel The China Garden won the Barbara Jefferis Award and was shortlisted for the Kibble Prize. Her 2013 memoir, Boy, Lost, garnered multiple awards including the Queensland, New South Wales and West Australian Premiers awards for non-fiction and the Kibble Prize. Her most recent novel, Shell, launched the legendary Scribner Australia literary imprint and was shortlisted in several major literary awards. She is currently working on a memoir set in Sweden and northern Norway that tracks the life of another lost child.

Discover more about the Eumundi Writers Festival here: https://eumundiwritersfestival.com.au/