The Intersection of Place and Identity in Writing

With Rijn Collins (Fed to Red Birds) and Nadia Mahjouri (Half Truth). Hosted by local writer, Anna Irwin-Schutze.

Rijn Collins is an award-winning writer of short stories and memoir. Her novel Fed to Red Birds was inspired by her writing residency in an Icelandic fishing village near the Arctic Circle. Long-listed for the 2024 Indie Book Awards, it explores identity formation through language, landscape and longing.

Nadia Mahjouri is a Moroccan Australian writer, counsellor and group facilitator specialising in maternal mental health. Her professional background is in health policy, governance and academia, where her research focused on ethics and feminist philosophy. Nadia and her husband live in Hobart/nipaluna with varying combinations of their family which includes three young adults, two school-aged children and a black Labrador puppy called Russell Sprout.

She is the host of The Whole Truth: Motherhood and the Writing Life. In this podcast, Nadia interviews authors about how they manage to keep writing while living in the messy middle of family life, work and creativity. Half Truth is her debut novel, and was published by Penguin Random House in February 2025.