Event update: We’re very sorry to share the news that Helen Garner is no longer able to join us at AWF26. Unforeseen surgery will make speaking engagements impossible for the next few months. She sends her apologies, and her sincere regrets.

For ticket-holders, you will soon receive an email from Ticketmaster about how to swap your ticket to Charlotte McConaghy’s new event time, an alternative session, or receive a refund.

From her bold fiction Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach and The Spare Room, to her debate-starting non-fiction, The First Stone, This House of Grief and The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner has indelibly shaped Australian Literature for 50 years and emerged as one of our age’s greatest writers.

But it is her diaries Garner regards as her favourite – and she’s not alone. David Nicholls, Nigella Lawson, The Times Literary Editor and Dua Lipa all assembled to praise her era-spanning collected diaries, How to End a Story.

In late 2025, they became the first diaries ever to win the Baillie Gifford Prize, with judges comparing her to Virginia Woolf.

Emily Perkins joins Garner to discuss a stellar writing career, and how to capture that most quietly remarkable thing: a life.

Supported by Platinum Patrons Pip Greenwood and David Gibson.