Writing Workshop with Karen Manton: Real Uncanny

This workshop looks at how surreal life can be; and how the uncanny – or the strange in the familiar – can lead us deeper into story and character.

What happens when the extraordinary and the ordinary, dream and nightmare, the mundane and the mysterious intermingle?

We’ll muse on uncanny moments in visual art, literature and film; and you’ll have short segments to play with ideas and shake your own writing out of the familiar into unusual and unfamiliar terrain.

Bring a blank notebook, a pencil/pen and your imagination.

Karen Manton is an award-winning writer who lives, writes and works in Darwin and Batchelor. She’s won five NT Literary Awards and has short stories published in various anthologies. Her first novel The Curlew’s Eye was published by Allen & Unwin in 2021, and was shortlisted for the NT Chief Minister’s Awards and longlisted for the national Independent Book Store awards.

Karen has a special interest in the uncanny, the surreal and all things strange – using these as inspirations to craft everyday ideas and characters into mysterious and intriguing narrative realms.