Helen Garner talks to Max Liu

Helen Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977 and immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene – it’s now considered a classic. Garner is widely recognised as one of Australia’s greatest living writers and has received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Up to now her books have rarely been published this side of the Atlantic, but that’s about to change. Join Garner at Hay Festival on a rare trip to the UK to celebrate the launch of her novels Monkey Grip, a seminal novel of Australian counterculture, and The Children’s Bach, a sparkling family novel set against the bohemian underground of 1980s Melbourne, as well as her non-fiction work This House of Grief, an engrossing true-crime story.