A night of literary readings and discussion on the theme of 'seed' featuring Jessica White in conversation with Katerina Bryant and readings from Mag Merrilees and Sarah Pearce.

The Dog-Eared Readings is a regular literary event that brings a curated selection of writers together for an evening of high-calibre readings and discussion. For the Nature Festival we will be hosting a special event that aligns with the Festival's theme of 'seed' and featuring writers and poets whose work focuses on the natural world.

Our featured writer is multi award-winning novelist, memorist and essayist Jessica White who will be in conversation with Katerina Bryant.

Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy (Viking 2007) and Entitlement (Viking 2012). A Curious Intimacy won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s awards and the Dobbie award, and was longlisted for the Dublin Award. Her hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud (UWA Publishing 2019), won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her latest creative work is Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays (Upswell Publishing 2025, Milkweed Editions 2027). She has also co-edited Life Writing in the Anthropocene (Routledge 2021). Jessica is the current president of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment, and Culture (Australia and New Zealand).

Moderator Katerina Bryant is a writer based on Kaurna Yerta. Her first book, Hysteria: A Memoir of Illness, Strength and Women’s Stories Throughout History (NewSouth), was published in 2020.

And our readers for the night will be activist and author Mag Merrilees and poet Sarah Pearce.

Mag Merrilees’s new story collection, Scared Angry Laughing (How to fix the world), is described as ‘a joyously unruly collection’. She is the author of two volumes of Fables Queer & Familiar (with Chia Moan, and also recorded for radio) and two novels, Big Rough Stones and The First Week, which won an Adelaide Festival Award and was shortlisted for other national awards. Her stories and essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Island, Meanjin, Splinter and elsewhere. She lives near Adelaide on unceded Kaurna Yerta.

Sarah Pearce is a poet, editor and researcher living and working on unceded Kaurna Country. Her work appears in Aeternum, Outskirts, Meniscus, Writing from Below, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Overland, Cordite, Rabbit and various anthologies, including Best of Australian Poems. She has held residencies, performed at festivals, and was awarded a 2024 Literary Fellowship at the State Library of South Australia. She is also the Deputy Editor of The Suburban Review. She writes about embodiment, queer experience, mental and physical health, intimacy and the environment. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming in 2026.

Please join us. It's going to be a wonderful night!

Contact the host of Dog-Eared Readings at The Nature Festival