In conversation

Wait Here | Lucy Nelson

A dancer discovers she can never have children – a revelation that pales in comparison to the other ways her body has betrayed her. Two elderly sisters who’ve been inseparable throughout life make a momentous decision. A wet nurse at Coney Island’s infamous ‘Incubator Babies’ sideshow is haunted by the ghost of her own stillborn daughter. A young woman worries about the lack of male role models in her little niece’s life…

For the women in Wait Here, who can’t, don’t or won’t have children, childlessness is a hard-won prize, a freedom, a stain, a joy, a battle, a trifle, a conundrum, a wound, an uneasy comfort on a burning planet.

It is nothing. It is everything.

Lucy Nelson has been published in Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Big Issue, Southword and elsewhere. She has received the Newcastle Short Story Award, the Writing NSW Varuna Fellowship and the Templeberg Fellowship from Writers Victoria. She lives with her husband on unceded Wodi Wodi and Dharawal Country. Wait Here is her first book.

Lucy will be in conversation with Heather Rose. Heather is the bestselling author of eight novels and a memoir. Her work has won the Stella Prize, the Christina Stead Prize, the Margaret Scott Prize, the ABIA Fiction Book of the Year and the Davitt Award. Heather’s novel The Museum of Modern Love has been widely translated, and was adapted to stage for Sydney Festival 2022. The Museum of Modern Love is currently in pre-production as a feature film, and Bruny is progressing towards becoming a tv series. Heather’s new novel will be launched here in Hobart by Fullers on September 30^th  – it is a work of historical fiction – and it is her tenth book. Heather mentored Lucy Nelson through the writing of her collection Wait Here.

Join them at the Afterword Cafe.