I'll be presenting a conference paper at Queens University Belfast, titled: Dead Hearts and Lonely Roads: Australian Rural Noir.

This paper will investigate Australian rural noir through a comparative textual analysis of Kenneth Cooke’s Wake in Fright, Chris Womersley’s The Low Road, and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites. It will consider the ways in which Australian rural noir uses landscape to subvert the pastoral paradigm and will examine the tensions between the exterior landscape and the interior life of the protagonists. Finally, it will reflect on the particularly Australian cultural anxieties implicit in these texts.