Special May event with Sarah Wilson

Join us for a special event with New York Times bestselling author and journalist Sarah Wilson on 29 May from 7.30pm at the University of Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. Sarah will speak to festival director Rosemarie Milsom about her new book I Eat the Stars, a deeply moving, wise guide to finding beauty and meaning in a collapsing world.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong with our world . . . that life has become precariously off-balance. We are hit hourly with headlines about climate catastrophes, tumbling democracies and fertility rates, AI singularity and nuclear threat, increasing economic inequality and genocidal slaughter, and the rise of technofascist and authoritarian rule.

Why now, and why everything, all at once? In I Eat the Stars, Sarah argues we are undergoing what every sophisticated civilisation before us has – complex systems collapse. But how do we continue to live as sensitive, tender-hearted humans amidst such a tumultuous shift? What does life look like when the systems we rely on deteriorate? How do we make financial decisions? Should we be prepping or homesteading? Should we be having kids? How do we hold the grief and process the moral injuries? And, so importantly, how do we avoid succumbing to doom and despair?

In I Eat the Stars, Sarah delves into these pressing questions (and her answers are rarely the obvious ones!). Drawing on wisdom gained from more than 200 conversations with scientists, energy futurists, historians, philosophers, game theorists and spiritual leaders, she takes readers on an intimate journey as she lays out a path for living fully, meaningfully and beautifully through these troubled times.

Tickets are $40.