All are welcome for a cash door fee of $5.00
Join us on Friday 17th July 11.00am in the Hayden Raysmith Room, Ross House, 247-251 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, 3000.
For the announcement of the Margaret Hazzard Short Story Award 2026. Competition judge Melanie Cheng will announce the prize winners and we will hear her report and the winning stories.
SWWV member Meryl Brown Tobin will also present her latest volume of poetry Unbreakable Bond introduced by Janice Williams. Unbreakable Bond will be available on the day at the reduced price of $20.00 (cash only) RRP $25.00
If you would like to join us for a shared lunch, please bring a contribution.
Speaker: Melanie Cheng is a writer and general practitioner based in Melbourne. Her short story collection, Australia Day, won the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for fiction. Her short stories have been featured in Meanjin, The Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue and World Literature Today, among many others. Her novel, Room for a Stranger was longlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin award and her latest work, The Burrow, was shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Stella Prize, The Age Book for the Year and the Australian Book Industry Awards. She has been a judge for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the NSW Literary Awards. Meryl Brown Tobin is an Australian multi-genre author who has sold well over a quarter of a million copies of her books and has had her shorter works published in more than 150 publications in Australia and overseas. Her books include a travel book, workbooks for primary students and black-line masters books of educational puzzles for primary and secondary pupils, poetry collections, a children's picture storybook and romantic suspense novel. Janice Williams is a fellow poet. She is President of Grampians Writers Group, editor of her church’s magazine, and a founding member of SWWV’s Perennial Poets, a forum where she became familiar with Meryl’s poetry. She enthusiastically enters writing competitions, and one of her most valued achievements was a 1st place in the Society’s Kathryn Purnell Poetry Prize. She experiments with all forms of poetry except prose poems, which she sees as fake poems. But everyone to their taste!