Liminal Festival x Wheeler Centre Ft: Evelyn Araluen and Mykaela Saunders

After eight years of conversations, we are moving beyond print and screen for three thrilling days at The Wheeler Centre and beyond. From August 2–4, catch some of the nation’s most talented writers, artists and thinkers as they contemplate the ways language has dictated and transformed the culture around us. Join us as we speculate on possible paths forward.

As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider: “Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognise her role as vital within that transformation.”

How might we use the repetitions of history to imagine a different future? At once a celebration and interrogation, join the Liminal Festival to hear writers discuss the future of the novel, how language twists and turns under colonial occupation, the profound joys that come with collaboration, and much more.

Opening Night

6PM—8PM | 2 AUGUST, 2024

For the past eight years, Liminal has carved out spaces for community to gather, converse and create. To open the inaugural Liminal Festival, we’re celebrating with readings from friends old and new. Taking on a brilliant range of genre and form, this event showcases what our rich literary landscape has to offer, with readings from Manisha Anjali, Evelyn Araluen, Brian Castro, Bella Li, Jennifer Nguyen,MykaelaSaunders and Michael Sun.

Language Under Occupation

10AM—11AM | 3 AUGUST, 2024

I have all the theory in the world to explain the logics of our erasure, the violence of our replacements and our more palatable Others. [...] But no one’s ever asked how we are both colonised by and inheritors of these words.
—Evelyn Araluen, “To the Poets”, Dropbear (2021)

Trace the contours of language, seek out its limits and push. Histories are cut up, struck through, misplaced, misremembered. Join Evelyn Araluen, Hasib Hourani and Mykaela Saunders as they discuss the careful craft of ripping the empire’s language to shreds. In their work, these brilliant writers shift form in myriad ways; they render nonlinear temporalities and introduce new vocabularies; they wield opacities and yet share the dearest of intimacies. Thinking through poetry and prose, language and craft, these three writers will share the shape of a language unsettled.

Buy tickets here.