Three multi-award winning authors, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be in conversation with Beejay Silcox on their book The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial

In July 2023, in the quiet Gippsland town of Leongatha, Erin Patterson—stay-at-home mother and true-crime devotee—invited her husband’s devoutly Christian family to lunch. Within days, three of her guests were dead and the fourth was in a coma. They had all been poisoned by death cap mushrooms. Two years later, Patterson stood trial, accused of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. The court case gripped the nation and fascinated people all over the world.

Among those drawn into the drama were three of Australia’s greatest literary forces: Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Together, they spent long days immersed in the case’s sinister and complex themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder. In The Mushroom Tapes, they examine the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, the tension between truth and narrative, ethics and entertainment, justice and voyeurism, and confront their own ambivalence about the record of true crime.

Helen Garner is one of Australia's most acclaimed and revered writers: of novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 1993 she won a Walkley award and in 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her best-selling books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, The Season and her diaries, the collected volume of which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize.

Chloe Hooper’s first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime , was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2006 she won a Walkley Award for her writing on the inquest into the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee. The Tall Man, her 2008 book-length account of the case, received numerous awards including the Victorian, New South Wales, Western Australian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.

Her account of the Australian Black Saturday bushfires, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire, was voted 2018’s Best Non-fiction title by Australian Independent booksellers. Her most recent book is Bedtime Story.

Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer and critic. Her best-selling books include The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer, the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning, and On Peter Carey

She has won Walkley Awards and been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for General Non-Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Prize for Non-Fiction at the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards and the Dobbie Literary Award.. She holds a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria.

Beejay Silcox is a prize-winning short fiction author and critic. In addition to her literary and cultural commentary, Beejay works as a professional reader: she’s an interviewer, prize judge, editor, award-winning creative writing educator and the former Artistic Director of Canberra Writers Festival.

Please note: There will be no author signings before or after the event. However, signed copies of the book by all three authors will be available for purchase at the Harry Hartog book stand located in the Lowitja O'Donoghue Cultural Centre foyer.

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A podcast will be made available after the event.

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