Spooky salon with Dinner Party Press

A haunted hellscape might be your corporate job in a cost of living crisis; so let us read to you some classic gothic literature in the post-truth era. Four writers will read spooky stories the weekend before Halloween bringing you ghosts and witchy prose.

Hannah Bambra is a writer, peer support worker and reproductive health advocate. She has a special interest in fertility and reproductive justice. She has been published in The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Monthly and more. She is the winner of The Pearl Prize for 2026 and the Thorne Harbour Health Media Award in 2025. She has also been awarded the Champion of Choice Award for Reproductive Rights Champion at the 2026 Children by Choice conference.

Laura McCluskey is a writer, editor and actor. Her two books The Wolf Tree and The Cursed Road have been published to popular and critical acclaim. As well as writing novels, she has penned several film and television projects for her production company Sibylline Films. Laura is also co-founder of Three Fates Theatre Company, and has performed across theatre, film, and television. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.

Emma Osborne (they/them) is a queer fiction writer and poet from Naarm Melbourne, Australia. Their debut novella GRIEF EATER is out now at Interstellar Flight Press. Emma’s writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Kaleidotrope, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, GlitterShip, Archer Magazine, HOMETOWN HAUNTS edited by Poppy Nwosu and WASTELANDS 3: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams. 

Zarah Yakubu is an emerging writer of Trawlwoolway/Palawa and Mwaghavul/Sura- Nigerian heritage. She originally hails from Trouwunna/Tasmania but currently lives and works on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung peoples. They are undertaking a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing at RMIT University. Their work has been published in Mascara Literary Review, Splinter, Island and others.

Your hosts for this evening will be Emily Westmoreland and Seren Bell.

Dinner Party Press host literary salons; the kinds of conversations you'd have around a dinner table with your best friends after a few bottles of wine. Smart friends, good books, house wine. 

Willows & Wine is a wine bar and bookstore based in West Melbourne.

This event takes place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People and we pay our respects to elders past and present.