Batchelor Institute Creative Writing Lecturer Sam Carmody was at the Nightcliff Library last week, discussing his first book The Windy Season. Darwin book lovers, writers and local book clubs all were in attendance and used this opportunity to ask the in-demand author plenty of questions.

Carmody discussed his ideas behind the novel, his writing process and how to get over the challenge of the blank page. The Windy Season, which was shortlisted for a 2014 Vogel Award, is a captivating novel about a young man’s search for his missing older brother in a foreboding Western Australian town.

Previously, Carmody’s non-fiction writing has appeared in The Griffith Review and ABC’s The Drum, and his short fiction has been published in The Review of Australian Fiction. He is a previous winner of the Mary Grant Bruce national literary award.

Currently, Carmody teaches the Diploma of Creative and Indigenous Writing at Batchelor Institute. This course develops students’ writing skills in a wide variety of genres. It also establishes a base for the further development of Indigenous expressive culture, through knowledge of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writing traditions.

In particular, the course emphasises how various genres are used by Indigenous peoples to articulate their own ‘voice’, and to communicate their histories and contemporary experiences to, and within, dominant non-Indigenous powers and broader society.