On Friday we held our resurrected First Draft Writer’s Festival for invited Year 9 and 10 students. This year we celebrated the theme ‘Home Grown’ in conjunction with this year’s Book Week theme ‘Read, Grow, Inspire’.

Featured at our event were some suitably talented ‘home-grown’ authors.

First cab off the rank was local oncologist and author Craig Mulhall presenting his first work of fiction called ‘The King of Rhye’. This exciting fantasy novel threads together the interests of former Queen front man Freddy and is a tapestry of fairy tale, dark apocalyptic fantasy, and rock and roll.

Next, we introduced local GP Annette Tyson and her first novel ‘Garrow Head’, a compelling look back at Van Dieman’s land as it was in 1831.

Local teacher Lauren Corvino was our next presenter for the day. Lauren hails from New York via many other destinations. She presented her beautiful work ‘The Nearby Nana’ and has also published ‘The Not-So-Far Pa’.

To close, we welcomed ex-Shalom student Ben Connolly. Ben presented a lively Q&A style session about his first book, the fantasy ‘Fate Market’. Ben graduated from Shalom in 2014 and this was his first event as an author, so Shalom has featured highly in his career.

The students were all wonderfully engaged and treated our visitors like rock-stars, an overall successful and worthwhile event.