Author Andy Kissane will run a workshop with the Leeton Writers Group on Saturday 19 October at Leeton Shire Library.
The workshop will focus on short fiction and it's an area where Kissane is an experienced author. One of his short stories, 'Old Friends' will appear in Black Inc’s anthology, Best Australian Stories, 2013; and Kissane was the winner of the 2013 Fish International Poetry Prize for his work 'Against Forgetting,' about a group of friends meeting to read poetry in Kabul when the practise was banned under the Taliban.
Exercises will lead participants into developing their ideas, so they'll leave the workshop with a head-start on their material. Andy Kissane has just finished teaching acclaimed short story writing courses for both the Sydney Writers’ Centre and the ACT Writers’ Centre.
A short film, Ngurrumbang, directed by Alex Ryan, was inspired by Andy Kissane’s poem, “The Station Owner’s Daughter, Narrandera”. The poem is based on oral history accounts of a massacre of Indigenous people in Narrandera in 1833 and dramatises the actions of a young woman in caring for one of the survivors. Ngurrumbang was one of the ten finalists in the Dendy Short Film Awards at this year’s Sydney Film Festival.
Andy Kissane’s fiction includes the novel, Under the Same Sun, shortlisted for the Vision Australia Audio Book of the Year and a book of short stories The Swarm, which was longlisted for the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published three books of poetry, Facing the Moon, Every Night They Dance and Out to Lunch -- which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry.
A fourth collection of poetry, Radiance will be published in early 2014. Kissane has taught Creative Writing at four universities and runs writing workshops for schools and the community. He is the 2013 Coriole National Wine Poet and six of his poems are featured on the back of Coriole’s Cabernet Shiraz.
For further information, please phone Western Riverina Arts on (02) 6953 5147.