In Montalto's first BOOKS & IDEAS event for the year, Tsiolkas will join Angela Savage for a conversation about the power and transformative mysteries of art, creativity and transgression, as well as the moral crises affecting contemporary fiction. Enjoy a delicious lunch and thought-provoking conversation with a writer whose warmth and insight flows through even his most challenging work.

The acclaimed author of novels such as The Slap, Damascus and Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas is known as one of Australia’s most beloved – and provocative – writers. In his latest novel, 7½, a novelist arrives in a secluded coastal town to escape the self-congratulatory moralism of the modern world and immerse himself in the beauty of nature. Here, he begins to write a book about an ageing ex-pornstar offered one last impossible-to-refuse job, and so begins a meditation on the choice between beauty and righteousness.

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of six novels, including Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award, as well as being made into a feature film. His fourth novel, the international bestseller The Slap, won Overall Best Book in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009, was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award, longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize and won the Australian Literary Society Gold, as well as the 2009 Australian Booksellers Association and Australian Book Industry Awards Books of the Year.

Christos’s fifth novel Barracuda was shortlisted for the ALS Gold Medal and the inaugural Voss Literary Prize. The Slap and Barracuda were both adapted into celebrated television series. Damascus won the 2020 Prize for Fiction at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and his latest novel 7 1/2 was published in November 2021.

Christos’s acclaimed collection of short stories, Merciless Gods, was published in 2014 and his critical literary study On Patrick White came out in 2018. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.

Book your ticket HERE.