Tracey Slaughter
Something Very Red Comes Very Close: Intensity and Short Fiction.
Saturday 1 July, 7.30pm
Tracey Slaughter has been described as “…a writer whose penetrating gaze reveals the full experience of her characters’ lives—tragic, comic, rich.”
Tracey’s short fiction has received numerous awards, including the international Bridport Prize 2014, a 2007 NZ Book Month Award, and BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary. Her latest book, Deleted scenes for lovers (Victoria University Press, 2016) was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Tracey lives in Cambridge and teaches Creative Writing at Waikato University, where she edits the online literary journal Mayhem. She is also an accomplished poet.
The Session
Tracey Slaughter will talk about her love for short fiction – its speed, its tension, its risk, its closeness to poetry. She looks at how the pressure of ending shapes this brief intense literary form, and explores why we need to listen to its marginal voices. Tracey will also read from her latest collection of short stories deleted scenes for lovers.
The Books
Tracey’s second collection, deleted Scenes for Lovers (Victoria University Press, 2016) comprises 17 powerful stories of contemporary New Zealand life, and was longlisted for the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
“Tracey Slaughter’s daring short fiction deposits you on a rollercoaster, hoists you in the air, puts you in a dank, dark cupboard to eavesdrop, spins you round and round, makes you feel things to the nth degree.” (Paula Green in Stuff, July 2016)
Tracey’s first collection, Her Body Rises (2005, Random House NZ) combines poems and short stories, in an evocative reflection on “the evolving body as it goes through childhood, adolescence, motherhood and old age”.
In between, Tracey published her novella, The Longest Drink in Town (Pania Press, 2015). The Longest Drink follows Tracey’s success in the Bridport Prize 2014, where one of the judges, novelist Andrew Miller commended her mastery of “the difficult art of selecting the telling moment, the detail that speaks,” praising her for her “determination to find what is luminous in what is plain.”
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Tracey will be appearing as part of the Word Café Evening Extravaganza, alongside Karyn Hay.
See next event: Sit Down and Write Workshop, with author Jacquie McRae > >
