WestTalks Live: In Conversation with Authors Vidya Madabushi and Jessica Seaborn

Against Expectations: Societies and families project them, and we project them onto ourselves. Characters rally against them. Join Authors Vidya Madabushi and Jessica Seaborn, in conversation with Emma O’Neill-Sandham as they discuss their novels, and the different ways their work grapples with expectations.

Vidya Madabushi is an Indian writer living in Sydney. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney, and her first novel, Bystanders, was published in India in 2015. Bystanders was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize, and a previous version was longlisted for the Australian Vogel Award. In 2018, Vidya received the Writing NSW Grant for Fiction for the creation of this novel. The Days Toppled Over is her Australian debut.

Born and raised in Brisbane, Jessica Seaborn lives in Sydney and works as a television and film publicist at Stan. Prior to this, she worked at SBS, Allen & Unwin and HarperCollins. Her writing has been published inThe Sydney Morning Herald, NewsCorp’s Body & Soul and Feminartsy. In 2020, she did Curtis Brown Creative where she completed the first draft of her debut novel, Perfect-ish. She lives in Western Sydney with her partner and a 50 kg bull mastiff named Boof. She turned thirty in August 2022.

Emma O’Neill-Sandham is a Western Sydney based writer and former journalist who has been published in The Lifted Brow, Going Down Swinging and Aniko Press. In 2020 she was a WestWords Western Sydney Emerging Writers’ Fellow and graduated in 2019 with a Master of Creative Writing from Macquarie University. 

Against Expectations: Societies and families project them, and we project them onto ourselves.

This event begins at 6.30pm and run to 7.30 but doors will be open from 6pm. 

In partnership with Penguin Random House and Dymocks.