Heather Rose is the award-winning author of Bruny and The Museum of Modern Love.

Her new memoir, nothing bad ever happens here, is deeply personal collection filled with reflections on love, death, creativity, and healing.

Growing up on the remote island of Tasmania, Heather falls in love with nature, but a tragedy that occurs when she is twelve sets her on a course to explore life’s mysteries. Here is a wild barefoot girl born for adventure, a curious seeker initiated in ancient rituals, a fledgling writer who becomes one of Australia’s most highly awarded authors, a businesswoman and a mother whose body may falter at any moment. Heartbreaking and beautiful, this is a love story brimming with courage and joy against all odds.

Heather is the author of eight novels, spanning literary fiction, magical realism, crime fiction, political fiction and fantasy. Her novels have won numerous prizes including the Stella Prize, the Christina Stead Prize, the Margaret Scott Prize and the ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year. Her work has been published internationally and translated into numerous languages. She is a passionate teacher of writing and a mentor for developing novelists. She is also one half of the children’s author Angelica Banks.

She lives by the sea in Tasmania.

Peter Hudson is a landscape and portrait painter living and working in Maleny. Since the late 1990s he has explored aspects of the natural world, astronomy, mythology, and history to investigate ‘the deep mystery of existence and us being here’. In 1998, he made the first of many trips to the Aboriginal communities of Daguragu and Kalkarinji in Gurindji country in the Northern Territory. The Gurindji people, their land, and the story of the Wave Hill walk-off have been major influences on his work. Hudson exhibits regularly, has won a number of regional art prizes, and is represented in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and Parliament House, Brisbane, among others.

His recent exhibition at the USC, The mystery of being here, is the most significant solo presentation of his work so far and responds to Hudson’s overarching interest in our relationship to the world around us. The exhibition was accompanied by a beautifully designed monograph with contributions by Christine Toussainte Morrow, Carol Schwarzman, Jeff McMullen, Charlie Ward and Kev Carmody.