Michaela McGuire
Michaela is a former artistic director of Melbourne Writers Festival, Sydney Writers’ Festival and Emerging Writers’ Festival. For the past near-decade, she has programmed some of the world’s most highly regarded writers festival programs, connecting and introducing Australian readers to their favourite authors including Ann Patchett, Helen Garner, Min Jin Lee, Tony Birch, Lauren Groff, Mykaela Saunders, Gabrielle Zevin, Richard Fidler, Anne Enright, Colson Whitehead, Jazz Money, George Saunders, Charlotte Wood, Shehan Karunatilaka, Richard Flanagan and Jenny Erpenbeck.
Her discerning taste has frequently resulted in international talents such as Paul Murray, Brit Bennett, Sarah Winman, Max Porter, Benjamin Dreyer, Mona Chalabi, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Alison Roman appearing in front of their largest live audiences to date, as well as a huge and noticeable increase in those authors’ book sales in the region.
Before her work in writers festivals, Michaela was co-curator and host of the internationally bestselling literary salon Women of Letters, and worked as a journalist and columnist for publications including The Monthly, The Age, QWeekend and The Saturday Paper. She is the author of three books of non-fiction: Last Bets: A true story of gambling, morality and the law, A Story of Grief and Apply Within: Stories of Career Sabotage.
Books I love…
In fiction, I’m frequently drawn to charming and winning novels about complicated relationships between families, lovers and friends, such as The Interestings, Commonwealth, Writers & Lovers, The Bee Sting and The In-Between. I’m interested in sharp, smart comedies of manners that are a great time as well as savage denouncements of social ills including Leave the World Behind, Very Nice, The Adversary and The Guest. I love great, sweeping epics like Great Circle, Still Life, Pachinko and Lessons, and admire novels that play with magic, form and genre including Lanny, The Night Guest, Carpentaria, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, Always Will Be and A Child’s Book of True Crime. While I love to be surprised and confronted with shattering revelations, voice is as important to me as plot, and I have felt equally transformed by spare, elegant novels such as Body Friend, The Children’s Bach, Assembly and The Sense of an Ending.
My taste in non-fiction is broad, and I’m drawn to all manner of stories and arguments across journalism, politics, pop culture, science and the natural world, memoir, philosophy, true crime and psychology that are told convincingly and with style. I admire the work of Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Jia Tolentino, Ellen van Neerven, Rachel Aviv, David Grann, Sarah Krasnostein, Helen Macdonald, Katherine Boo, Robert Macfarlane, John Berendt and Anna Krien.