Selling Fast

Commercial vs Art

Sat 7 Sep 2019

John Birmingham + Nicholas Carah + Peggy Frew

Cinema B, GoMA

Panel

7158

#Performances

#About the event

Duration: 60 minutes

Is pop as valid as classical music? Are those who ignore commercial fiction and non-fiction snobs? Can literature emerge from the pressing need to eat? This panel will look at the pressure to produce commercial work.

#Artists

John Birmingham

John Birmingham has published lots of books. So many that he sort of loses track of them. He wrote features for magazines in a decade before publishing He Died With A Falafel In His Hand, working for Rolling Stone, Playboy and the Long Bay Prison News amongst others. He won the National Award For Non-Fiction with Leviathan: an unauthorised biography of Sydney. He started writing airport novels because they were more fun. His most recent series of books that improve with altitude are the Girl in Time novels.

Nicholas Carah

Nicholas Carah is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts are The University of Queensland. His research examines our experience with the participatory and algorithmic cultre of digital media. He's particularly interested in how brands use digital media to shape our cultural spaces and practices. He is the author of Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (2016), Media & Society: production, content and participation (2015) and Pop Brands: branding, popular music and young people (2010), and co-editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018).

Peggy Frew

Peggy Frew’s work has appeared in New Australian Stories 2, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, and The Big Issue. Islands is her third novel. Her first, House of Sticks, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and was shortlisted for the UTS Glenda Adams Prize for New Writing. Hope Farm, her second, won the Barbara Jefferis Award, was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

#Moderator

Stefan Treyvaud

Stefan Treyvaud has enjoyed a successful and diverse career in the arts, cultural and lifestyle sectors including senior marketing and communications roles with QPAC, Brisbane Powerhouse, Queensland Music Festival and State Library Queensland.

As a writer and content producer, he has made significant contributions to World Science Festival Brisbane, Melbourne Writers Festival, University of Melbourne Ideas Festival, Melbourne Festival and White Night Melbourne.

Prior to his foray into the arts, Stefan wrote for the Courier Mail’s Books Art and Music lift out and was Editor of Brisbane’s hugely successful map magazine.