Niki Savva, Patrick Mullins, and Miranda Darling will be speaking at multiple events at this year's Sorrento Writers Festival.
Check out the full program, and book tickets HERE
SORRENTO WRITERS FESTIVAL: Niki Savva, Patrick Mullins, and Miranda Darling
Date & Time:
23 April
Location:
Sorrento VIC
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$36.99 AUD
Earthquake
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABA BOOKDATA ADULT NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
The best of Niki Savva’s scene-setting newspaper columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with a riveting and deeply informed analysis of Australia’s epoch-making 2025 election.
Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.
When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.
But Niki had noticed the ground shifting: the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’
In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, following on from So Greek, The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, and Bulldozed, she also provides a detailed, considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, of an election that transformed Australian politics.
$39.99 AUD
The Stained Man
The extraordinary tale — ‘A two-volume mystery!’ Mark Twain called it — of the solicitor who incited a campaign to free a man he knew was guilty of attempted murder, who lost his reputation and ability to practise, and who embarked on a decades-long political career to regain it all.
Sydney, 1895. Richard Meagher is a brilliant criminal defence solicitor with ambitions in politics. Into his life comes George Dean, a handsome, popular ferryman accused of attempting to poison his own wife. The evidence pointing to Dean’s guilt is damning but, in Dean’s protests of innocence and the clamour of public support, Meagher senses that a great opportunity is at hand.
Nine months later, everything is in ruins. Dean is in gaol, and Meagher has lost everything. Determined to recover his reputation and vindicate his actions, Meagher begins a twenty-five-year quest to rewrite the ‘Dean case’ and reclaim all he has lost. That quest will put him in the glare of public scrutiny, arouse enemies at every turn, propel him to high political office, and entwine his cause with the making of the Australian nation.
In a work of true crime with a twist, moving from sordid Sydney streets to the corridors of parliament, and spanning the critical years of Australia’s history in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, The Stained Man tells the riveting story of Australia’s most sensational scandal — and of how an indelible stain was eventually expunged.
$29.99 AUD
Fireweather
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 STELLA PRIZE
It all began when they started running away …
Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad …
In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona’s head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being — one that might make whole her broken heart.
Niki Savva
Niki Savva is a highly acclaimed political writer. She was twice political correspondent for The Australian, and headed up the Canberra bureaus of both The Herald Sun and The Age. When family tragedy forced a career change, she became Peter Costello’s press secretary for six years and was then on John Howard’s staff for three. Her work has brought her into intimate contact with Australia’s major political players for more than 40 years. She is a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and appears on ABC TV’s Insiders.
Patrick Mullins
Patrick Mullins is a Canberra-based writer and academic who has a PhD from the University of Canberra. Tiberius with a Telephone, his first book, won the 2020 NSW Premier’s Non-Fiction Award and the 2020 National Biography Award. He is also the author of The Trials of Portnoy: how Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system.
Miranda Darling
Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She read English and Modern Languages at Oxford then took a Masters in Strategic Studies and Defence from the ANU (GSSD). She became an adjunct scholar at a public policy think tank, specialising in non-traditional security threats. She has published both fiction and nonfiction.
