Tuck in to a feast of flavoursome new writing from the brand new food-themed edition of Griffith Review! Join Editor Carody Culver for a delectable conversation about art, bodies and consumption with contributors Jumaana Abdu, Kris Kneen and Elizabeth Willing, and then enjoy a taster of what’s in the book with readings from Anna McGahan, Laura Elvery, Myles Mcguire and Melanie Myers. 

Griffith Review 78: A Matter of Taste serves up a smorgasbord of essays, fiction and reportage about what we eat and how we talk about it. It explores food as spectacle and status symbol, as fad and fantasy, as capital and cultural currency. If we are what we eat, then who are we in the twenty-first century? 

About the panel

Jumaana Abdu’s work has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland and The Sydney Morning Herald. She is currently working on her debut novel as the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellowship and is in her final year of medical school.  

Laura Elvery is the author of two short story collections, Trick of the Light (2018) and Ordinary Matter (2020), which won the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection at the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards. She has also won the Josephine Ulrick, Margaret River, Neilma Sidney and Fair Australia short story prizes, and has contributed to Overland, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and The Big Issue fiction edition, among others.

Kris Kneen is an award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction, including An Uncertain Grace, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. They have written and directed broadcast television documentaries and were the Copyright Agency Non-fiction Fellow in 2020. The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen is their latest book. 

Anna McGahan has published two books, Metanoia (2019) and Skin (2020). Her essays and poetry have appeared in Soul Tread and Feminartsy. She won the Queensland Theatre Company Young Playwright’s Award in 2008 and 2009, was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award in 2010 and was finalist for The Saturday Paper’s Horne Prize in 2016. 

Myles McGuire’s writing has been nominated for the Peter Carey Short Story Award, the Newcastle Short Story Award, the Monash Writing Prize and the QUT Writing Prize. He teaches creative writing at QUT and is currently at work on his first novel. 

Melanie Myers won the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award for an Emerging Writer in 2018. Her winning manuscript was published as Meet Me at Lennon’s (UQP), which was shortlisted for the 2020 Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Arena Magazine, TEXT and Hecate, among many others.

Elizabeth Willing is a Brisbane-based visual artist. Her exhibitions and concept meals have been held in Australia and overseas at Trapholt Museum of Art and Design in Denmark, Tinguely Museum in Basel, Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. She has worked in the studios of Janine Antoni in New York and Thomas Rentmeister in Berlin, as well as undertaken residencies at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2014), Helsinki International Art Program HIAP (2015), The Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide (2019), Museum of Brisbane (2020) and Metro Arts (2022). She is represented by Tolarno Galleries Melbourne.