Julia Leigh – April 16 2017

World Heritage Day – April 18 2017

Tasmanian Wilderness – World Heritage Site since 1982

Julia is a novelist, film director and screenwriter. She majored in philosophy and law at The University of Sydney and holds a PhD in English from the University of Adelaide. She has spent extensive periods in Paris and New York, where she was Adjunct Associate Professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University. Julia was admitted to the NSW Supreme Court as a Legal Practitioner and for a time worked as a legal adviser at the Australian Society of Authors where she became interested in writing. Her mentors have included authors Frank Moorhouse and, as part of the 2002–2003 edition of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, Toni Morrison. Julia’s novel, The Hunter, was adapted into a 2011 feature film starring Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill and Frances O’Connor. Julia also wrote and made her directorial debut with Sleeping Beauty, a 2011 film starring Emily Browning about a university student drawn into a mysterious world of desire. Her film was selected for the main competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

The Hunter
Faber & Faber, 1999; ISBN 9780571200092
The hunter arrives in an isolated community in the Tasmanian wilderness with a single purpose in mind: to find the last thylacine, the tiger of fable, fear and legend. The man is in the employ of the mysterious ‘Company’, but his sinister purpose is never revealed and as his relationship with a grieving mother and her two children becomes more ambiguous, the hunt becomes his own. Leigh’s Tasmania is a place where the wilderness can still claim lives; where the connection between people and the land is at best uneasy and cannot be trusted. In prose of exceptional clarity and elegance, Julia Leigh creates an unforgettable picture of a man obsessed by an almost mythical animal in a damp dangerous landscape.

Disquiet
Penguin Books, 2008; ISBN 9780143113508
Olivia arrives at her mother’s chateau in rural France (the first time in more than a decade) with her two young children in tow. Soon the family is joined by Olivia’s brother Marcus and his wife Sophie – but this reunion is far from joyful. After years of desperately wanting a baby, Sophie has just given birth to a stillborn child, and she is struggling to overcome her devastation. Meanwhile, Olivia wrestles with her own secrets about the cruel and violent man she married many years before. Exquisitely written and reminiscent of Ian McEwan and JM Coetzee, Disquiet is a darkly beautiful and atmospheric story that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned.