Death takes many forms; quick or slow, expected or sudden, ritual, illegal and often taboo. Inspire DEATH presents three different perspectives on the inevitable. Featuring Andrew McMillen, Steven Amsterdam and Dr Leah Kaminsky.
An AUSLAN interpreter will present at this event.
Professor Frederick d’Agostino is a philosopher and social scientist based at The University of Queensland. he has edited the Australasian Journal of Philosophy; Politics, Philosophy and Economics; and the Routledge Companion to Political and Social Philosophy. Professor d’Agostino is passionate about people, and will engage with artists and audiences both on the ground and online throughout the Festival.
Andrew McMillen is an award-winning freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane. His newest book is Skeleton School: Dissecting the Gift of Body Donation, published by University of Queensland Press in September 2016. His first book, Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs, was published by UQP in 2014. His feature journalism has been published in The Weekend Australian Magazine, Rolling Stone, Good Weekend, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Qweekend, and Buzzfeed. In 2015, he was named Freelance Journalist of the year at the Queensland Clarion Awards. He also hosts Penmanship, a podcast about Australian writing culture, which features in-depth interviews with people who earn a living from working with words.
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia and former Online Editor at Hunger Mountain. Her debut novel The Waiting Room is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die was released by HarperCollins in June 2016, for which she was awarded the Reading Glenfern fellowship for an Established author in 2014 and the RMIT University McCraith Fellowship in 2015. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician – writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds and MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Steven Amsterdam is the award winning author of Things We Didn’t See Coming (winner of the Age Book of the Year, Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction and long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award) and What the Family Needed (AWW Great Read and long-listed for the Dublim IMPAC literary award). He lives in Melbourne with his partner where he works as a palliative care nurse.
