Penguins say:

THEME: High Rollers
WEAR: Rich people clothes (diamonds, gold plated vestments, yachting shoes, etc etc)
BRING: MONEY ($12 to donate to our fabulous book and iPhone app fund), or a short story about MONEY and a cushion or something to sit on so you don’t wreck your posh clothes.
WHO’S PROGRAMMED: Louis Nowra, Craig Silvey, Mark Mordue, Alli Sebastian Woolfe and more.

...Possibly the thing you’d least like to hear from the Australia Council when they’re giving you five grand to put out an anthology:
“yeah – most of us thought you guys’d fail, but some of us said, well, at least if they fail, they’ll fail spectacularly.”

To which I say - WHAT? Just because we want to create the most pimped out hard cover and iPhone short fiction anthology this nation has ever seen AND still pay our writers, AND film people reading stuff in various locations around Sydney – just because this shit is BIG, doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

But we have a wee problem. We need more money than Oz Co gave us. Which is why we are only associating with a certain type of person now. The rich type of person. Sorry to all who thought we were more interested in wild new ideas and imaginative short fiction than money. You were wrong. We are now only programming stories about young couples in domestic situations who struggle to find a balance between their work and love lives. Why? Because this is what our focus groups told us ‘rich people’ want, and it is ‘rich people’, not you, who can give us money.

But you are exempt from writing about these drab things, of course, if you are famous. Because we have also discovered that famous people attract people with money like flies to a green piece of steak.

For this reason we have asked a bunch of very famous people to come and read some short stories on 20th of September. Those famous people include:

Louis Nowra:
Louis Nowra is probably most famous for writing the plays (and films) Cosi, and Radiance. But he also has a list of publications longer than space on this event posting will allow me to print. For those of you too young to have seen Cosi or Radiance, but old enough to have auditioned for NIDA, odds are your monologue was written by Louis Nowra. It is a miracle that one man’s monologues can withstand DECADES of auditions by mega eager 18 year olds. But there you have it. The man’s a genius.

Craig Silvey:
Craig Silvey has just spent a large amount of time overseas. That’s how famous he is. Too famous to live in Australia. He probably had to move overseas because there was no more room in his house after he had to shoulder his front door shut against his five millionth award. He read for us in May 2009, when he was in Sydney promoting Jasper Jones (the reason he can’t stop winning awards), and he is beloved by many for his book Rhubarb, which he wrote at the tender age of 19.

Mark Mordue:
Is Nick Cave’s biographer! He has also written for the SMH, Vogue, Rolling Stone and a plethora of other publications both here and overseas. He was the guest editor of the special Rock and Roll edition of Meanjin in 2006, which was called ‘All Yesterday’s Parties’. He also teaches journalism at UTS, and is beloved by all his students.

With more famous people to be announced…

So – how can you possibly get into such a prestigious event? By being rich!

Or at least, by dressing like someone who could feasibly be rich.

We’re charging a very special $12 for this PPR, as all proceeds are going to our impending publication, but feel free to give us more money if you want (or less if you promise to bring loads of people).

Get earning (and writing),