It’s the early 19th century and a small sailing ship with a cargo of convict women and their children is crossing the ocean to a penal colony. Among those trying to survive is a 15-year-old girl. After caring for her only friend who has poisoned herself, she discovers a kind of liberation within the confines of the ship, as she moves into her unknowable, distant future. Ali Smith says: ‘ This powerful novella, historical and immediate, atmospheric, visceral, lyrical and frank, crosses the horizon between story, history and reality. Its passengers might be in the grip of some foul brutal institutional power but their life, their vitality and their survival form the beating heart of a unique read, the language of which forms a rough fabric so tangible you can feel it on your skin.
Kate Kruimink is a writer from southern Lutruwita. Her first novel, A Treacherous Country, won the 2020 Vogel/Australian’s Literary Award. It was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and longlisted in the UK for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In 2021, she was one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Novelists. Kate also writes short stories and essays, which have been published widely. Kate’s second novel, Heartsease (Picador 2024), won the 2025 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction. In 2024, her novella, Astraea, won the Weatherglass Books Novella Prize in the UK.
Kate will be in conversation with Jane Rawson. Jane is the author of novels A History of Dreams, From the Wreck and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, a novella, Formaldehyde, and, with James Whitmore, non-fiction books Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World and The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change. You can read her essays in Living with the Anthropocene; Fire, Flood, Plague; and Reading Like an Australian Writer. She is the managing editor at Island magazine and lives in south-east Lutruwita/Tasmania.
Join them at the Afterword Cafe.
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