Readers - Books and Conversation

A monthly series by Petersham Bowling club hosted by Michaela Kalowski.

Celebrating books and readers, this is a new monthly series of in-depth and relaxed conversations with authors about their latest work, and their body of work, their writing process and the ideas that inspire them.

Michaela Kalowski is an interviewer, moderator and curator for writers and ideas festivals. Highlight interviews include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Michelle de Kretser, Amos Oz, Stan Grant, Holly Ringland & Etgar Keret. She's the curator of ABC RN’s on-air writers festival, Big Weekend of Books, now in its 4th year. In 2022 she was curator of International Author events for the Brisbane Writers Festival. Michaela has conducted radio interviews for ABC RN’s The Music Show, Big Ideas & The Bookshelf, ABC Classic and has presented programs across ABC radio.

February’s featured author: Richard Fidler

For more than a decade now Richard has been the voice on the airwaves with his in-depth, hour-long interview program on ABC RN. The Conversations podcast is the most popular in Australia, with more than six million program downloads a month.

In another life, Richard was a member of the confrontational music/comedy trio The Doug Anthony Allstars (DAAS), which played to audiences all over the world: from the West End of London to the streets of Paris and New York, to isolated mining towns in outback Australia. He’s also the author of the bestselling books The Golden Maze (a history of Prague) and Ghost Empire (tracing the history of Istanbul and Constantinople), and co-author of the bestselling Saga Land with Kári Gíslason (a compendium of some of the best stories from Iceland).

His most recent book is The Book of Roads & Kingdoms: exploring the lives and stories of medieval wanderers who left medieval Baghdad to explore the furthest reaches of the known world. Part history and part travelogue, the stories in this book form a crazy quilt picture of a lost world. The book has had rave reviews and was recently shortlisted for the 2023 Indie Book Awards in the Non-Fiction category.

Tickets are $10.00 per person with doors opening at 8 pm.

Petersham Bowling Club is honoured to present these events for our community and would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land we meet on and pay our respects to the Elders both past, present and emerging.