Colin Roderick Memorial Lecture

In 2025 the Colin Roderick Memorial Lecture was presented in Cairns on Tuesday 29^th July and Townsville on Thursday 31^st July by author, Emily Maguire.

The bible, political gossip and a splash of Frida Kahlo: on the importance of wild cultural receptivity and promiscuous curiosity in creative practice.

This lecture invited participants inside the creative process by exploring the often invisible work of receptivity — the open, porous state through which ideas are seeded and developed. Using examples from her own writing, as well as drawing on the work of a range of writers and artists, Emily will show how a deep attentiveness to art, language, history, news and popular culture is vital to both initial inspiration and cultivating complexity and depth in creative work.

Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books. Her novel An Isolated Incident was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and her 2022 book Love Objects was shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award.

She was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. Emily has an MA in literature and works as a teacher and mentor to young and emerging writers.

Her latest book is the novel, Rapture, which has been longlisted for the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year.