Les Winspear has established a broad based career as a playwright, actor and director. His plays include outdoor theatre, early childhood, primary age, community and historically based pieces. He was an actor and founding member of Riverina Theatre Co, worked with Salamanca Theatre Co, and helped found Zootango Theatre Co in Hobart. While with Zootango, he was instrumental in the development and presentation of family shows in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. Subsequently, he helped found Theatre Alfresco, a cooperative which provides quality theatre in the Gardens over summer.
Past events 2020
We regularly host events, including launches, signings, readings, and announcements of prizes. These are usually held in the shop in the early evenings, where you can enjoy a glass of wine with your launch speech, and take the opportunity for some after-hours browsing. We also sell books for events held at other venues.
Check our calendar of upcoming events, or have a look at photos and highlights from past events below.
If you would like to be added to our events mailing list, see our Bookshop Community page. If you are interested in holding an event with us, please email us.
Book Launch: A Clue for Clara (Lian Tanner)
The Hobart Bookshop, 11.00am, Sunday September 20th
We were delighted to host the launch, by Les Winspear, of Lian Tanner's new children's book, A Clue for Clara.
'Greetings human. Am looking for a major crime to solve. Please inform me of any recent murders, kidnappings or jewel heists in this area.' Clara wants to be a famous detective with her own TV show. She can read claw marks, find missing feathers and knows morse code and semaphore. There's just one problem. She's a small scruffy chook, and no one takes her seriously. But when she teams up with Olive, the daughter of the local policeman, they might just be able to solve the crimes that have been troubling the town of Little Dismal.
Lian Tanner is the author of the internationally bestselling The Keepers series, The Rogues and The Hidden. Her first picture book, Ella and the Ocean, won the NSW Premier's Award for Children's Literature earlier this year and was also longlisted for the CBCA Picture Book of the Year.
Book Launch: Another Love, Another Life (Graeme Hetherington)
The Hobart Bookshop, 5.30pm, Wednesday September 16th
We were pleased to host the launch, by Ralph Spaulding, of Graeme Hetherington's new collection of poetry, Another Love, Another Life.
Graeme Hetherington’s poems of loves and lives past are works of darkness describing human connections that lead ultimately to loss and loneliness. The emotional impact of the poet’s mindscape and his relationships with others is enhanced by beautifully drawn images from the natural world and references to classical myths. These features, together with skillful versification, make this collection a poetic tour de force.'
Ralph Spaulding
Book Launch: I Shed My Skin (Jane Giblin)
The Hobart Bookshop, 5.00pm, Wednesday July 15th
We were excited to host the launch of Jane Giblin's book, I Shed My Skin, published by Forty South.
I Shed My Skin - A Furneaux Islands Story evolved out of an exhibition of Jane Giblin’s artwork which toured Tasmania in 2019. It revolves around strangers who come to a remote land and learn how to win a living from it. Traditions and relationships to the Furneaux Islands, built since the 1890s, were consolidated across five generations. During the latter part of the 20th century significant changes had to be met.
Giblin travelled up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia interviewing her father’s cousins in addition to some senior Furneaux community members. She sought memories of her great grandparents, feelings about the islands, and farming and birding as well as how they were acclimatising to changed land access and tradition due to successful land rights claims by local First Nations people. Giblin’s part-collaborator on her exhibition/book is retired lecturer in geography and well-known Tasmanian writer, Pete Hay.