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EVENTS

5 April, Saturday, Newcastle Writers Festival, Free event. Info to follow

17 April, 7.30pm Thursday, online event, ‘Ricochet online launch’. Free event, details to follow

About Ricochet

From the editors, Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

‘As you travel, perhaps laterally, through this anthology, you will encounter various emotions and emotional responses, many of them registered subtly or with introspection. The ricocheting effects of these feelings can be felt throughout in the play of language and the testing of literary form – and, also, in the oblique interconnectedness that ties many of these pieces together, as one work’s registration of experience echoes clearly or distantly in another’s. We invite you to immerse yourself in the dynamic, shifting, often unexpected and frequently startling world of Ricochet. Allow yourself to be tantalised and captivated by the condensed, ramifying power of these brief and complex forays into narrative. Consider how these pieces of microlit have the capacity to ricochet through time and space, shaping the ways we imagine our world.

Thank you to all the writers who submitted microlit, it was a pleasure to read your writing and we hope you will continue to write and experiment with the form. Congratulations to the writers who were shortlisted and whose works have been published in this anthology and to the winners of the National and Hunter competition.

Thank you to Rosemarie Milsom, director of the Newcastle Writers Festival, to program manager, Amy Lovat and to the festival team for the continued support and sponsorship of the award. We have been very fortunate to have been able to launch the microlit anthologies, to curate lively panel sessions and to present microlit in visual, audio-visual and interactive formats at this wonderful annual festival.

Thank you to the commissioned national and international writers. And thank you to the team at Spineless Wonders – to Bettina Kaiser for her brilliant graphic design, to Caitlin Miller, our tireless typesetter and to publisher Bronwyn Mehan for her passion for the microlit form. We always enjoy collaborating with Spineless Wonders to take the microlit form to new national and international readerships and audiences.

Contributors include:

Carolyn Abbs | Joanna Atherfold Finn | Danielle Baldock | Magdalena Ball | Kathleen Miriam Bleakley | Lyn Chatham | Julie Chevalier | Shady Cosgrove | Angela Costi | PS Cottier | Charles D’Anastasi | Jan Dean | Sharon Douglas | Dave Drayton | Cassandra Duell | Anne Elvey | Susan Fealy | Martin Figura | Claire Gaskin | Jennifer Harrison | Dominique Hecq | Hilary Hewitt | Richard Holt | Helen Hopcroft | Kylie Hough | Christine Howe | Helen Ivory | Anna Kerdijk Nicholson | Andrew Leggett | Jacquelyn Leigh | Kurt Lovelace | Rupert M Loydell | DS Magid | Susan Midalia | Alyson Miller | Mark O’Flynn | Jane O’Sullivan | Lili Pâquet | Brenda Proudfoot | Arna Radovich | KA Rees | Sandra Renew | Fiona Robertson | Maggie Shapley | Leni Shilton | Jonathan Taylor | Deborah Van Heekeren | Ariella Van Luyn | Jodi Vial | Cedar Whelan | Karen Whitelaw

CASSANDRA ATHERTON is an award-winning prose poet and international expert on prose poetry. She was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University, a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Japan, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. Cassandra has judged many literary awards, including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Prize for Poetry, The Lord Mayor’s Prize for Poetry and the Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley short story competition. She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, series editor at Spineless Wonders, dispatches editor for The Fortnightly Review and associate editor at MadHat Press (USA).

PAUL HETHERINGTON has published 18 full-length collections of poetry, most recently Sleeplessness (Pierian Springs Press, 2023). His poetry has won or been nominated for over 50 national and international awards and competitions,including winning the 2024 inaugural The Marion Halligan Award in the ACT Literary Awards for the book Sleeplessness and the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He founded International Poetry Studies in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra in 2013 and founded the international Prose Poetry Project in 2014. He is Emeritus Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra. Cassandra and Paul co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020). They are currently working on ‘Ekphrastic Poetry: An Introduction’ for Princeton UP.

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