Our Featured Book this week is Untethered by debut novelist, Ayesha Inoon. This segment is brought to you by Harper Collins.
Ayesha Inoon is a Sri Lankan-Australian writer with a unique cultural perspective, which she brings to her writing. Born in Colombo, she travelled widely and worked as a journalist in Sri Lanka before immigrating to Australia in 2013.
Winner of the ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize 2022, her debut novel, Untethered, is partly based on her experiences as an immigrant Muslim woman. Ayesha was a recipient of the inaugural 2019 Penguin Random House Write It Fellowship for an early draft of this novel. In 2020 she was selected for the Rosie Scott Writing Residency in NSW, and in September 2022 she was awarded a KSP fellowship by the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre in WA to work on her second novel.
Her feature articles have been published by SBS Australia, The Sunday Times Sri Lanka, Serendib and Explore Sri Lanka.
Ayesha lives in Canberra with her two children.
Advice: Be true to your story and write the story that’s in your heart.
Write in a way that you fall in love with your story – that’s what makes a reader fall in love with your story.
Debut recommendation: Tracey Lien – All That’s Left Unsaid
Find Ayesha Inoon on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
This convo goes a lot of places: chocolate factories, Kryall Castle, old school video store porn sections…forgive us – sometimes we get off topic. ON general writing/bookish things:
- Kate’s starting a new project and taking the advice Amy Taylor mentioned in a recent chat about using the time pre-publication to get stuck into something new
- Michelle Prak uses powerpoint to plan – mind blown!
- How Kate uses her process journal
- Kate’s failure at the Tik Tok experiment & our general disillusionment with Twitter
- Katherine loved 28 Questions by Indyana Schneider and Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess
- Kate loved The Voice to Parliament Handbook by Thomas Mayo & Kerry O’Brien and A Real Piece of Work by Erin Riley
- Kate’s been watching Never Have I Ever & that final episode of The Last of Us
- Kate loved The Little Mermaid – check out this ep of Stop Everything for excellent background
- Katherine’s been listening to Hamish Blake’s podcast How Other Dads Dad
Enormous thank you to our new patron Lynne Hume who is supporting the pod via our patreon – and as always, to all our incredible patrons and listeners.
This week we’re shouting out to debut authors from the #DebutCrew2023 over on instagram. Enjoy meeting new authors and their books!
The First Time podcast 