Highlights - MADELEINE WATTS - Author of The Inland Sea

"The Inland Sea came out in 2020. And in that period as I was writing it, I would keep noticing each year would be 'the worst on record.' Like the hottest day on record, the most fires on record. And there was a sort of strangeness to having written the book in a period of Black Summer fires that burned for nearly six months and just decimated huge sways of land. In 2020, I had gone back to the Sydney Writers Festival and spent some time with family, and then just got stuck for months in the COVID lockdown. And I would go on runs into these stretches of bushland that had been burned, and I would make my way through these skeleton forests. The trees were black. The soil was black. There was no color at all. No bird song. No insects. And it was March. There should have been so much wildlife. It was deeply eerie."