Reckoning the Anthropocene
Description
Sarah Walker (The Water Takes) and Rose Michael (Else) explore approaches to climate and dystopic fiction that unpack attitudes towards the perceived end of the world. Together, dissecting the ability of fiction to grapple with the tumultuous reality of living through global political and environmental destabilisation. And examining how climate fiction can impact our perspective on everyday life, while also helping us feel less alone. Moderated by Eli Sutherland.
Lineup
Sarah Walker
Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based writer, artist and photographer who makes work about anxiety, intimacy and absurdity. She has a particular interest in the body, and the ways in which it escapes our control, as well as how apprehension of disaster impacts our sense of the present. Her writing crosses both fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, The Water Takes, is out now with Summit Australia. Her first book, The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, a collection of non-fiction essays about the unruly body in late capitalism, won the 2021 Quentin Bryce Award. She was joint winner of the 2025 KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize, was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize and received the 2020 ABR Victorian Rising Star award. She has been published in The Monthly, Overland, Meanjin, Island Magazine, Kill Your Darlings, the ABR, the AFR and The Guardian. She co-founded and co-edits the Gothic sound studies publication Hidden Door Journal, and co-hosted the podcast Contact Mic.
Rose Michael
Author of The Asking Game, The Art of Navigation, and Else, Rose Michael has been runner-up for the Vogel and received an Aurealis Honourable Mention. She has published spec fic in Island, Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, Meanjin etc and spec crit in The Conversation, TEXT, Sydney Review of Books. She is a senior lecturer at RMIT, and has been a commissioning editor as well as co-founding the micro-press Arcade Publications.
Eli Sutherland
Eli Sutherland (they/them) is an award-winning poet, writer, and creative consultant living on Wurundjeri Country. They are a non-binary, queer, disabled creative, the Festival Director of Trans Book Festival, and studying a Master of Arts (Writing and Literature) at Deakin University. Eli was awarded a 2026 Varuna Residential Fellowship for their fantasy manuscript, No One Without the Other, and their writing has appeared in ABC, Cordite, Mascara Review, StylusLit, Swamp Magazine, Left Brain Media, and more.
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