Winner: The Momento Pro Best Designed Independent Book, 2016 Australian Book Design Awards

From 2013 – 2014, if:book conducted the Memory Makes Us live writing event at writers festivals in Brisbane, Darwin, Melbourne and Perth.

Twelve writers created new work live, using as their inspiration the memories contributed by the audience.

The writing that emerged is beautiful, funny, sad, and surreal.

Creating a print edition of the project presented us with a challenge. Like all memories, the pieces that make up Memory Makes Us are ephemeral and must eventually fade away.

So, Memory Makes Us is published to newsprint.

The tabloid size of the book also provided us with a much larger canvas than the typical book so we asked designers Zoe Sadokierski, Gemma Warriner, and Alissa Dinallo to take a cue from the content and the process and create a book that makes full use of its space on the page and that reflects the fragmented nature of memory itself in surprising and playful ways.

Judges for the 64th Australian Book Design Awards praised its 'rich and experimental' use of typography and described it as a 'brave statement that is conceptually correct and stays true to itself'. One judge commented: 'I love the formal experimentation happening here, including how the form of a 'book' itself is being challenged'.

Writers

Kate Pullinger’s 2009 novel The Mistress of Nothing won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes.  Her prize-winning digital fiction projects Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel have reached audiences around the world. Kate gives talks and readings frequently.  She is Professor of Creative Writing and New Media at Bath Spa University.

Marie Munkara is of Rembarranga, Tiwi and Chinese descent and has extensive family throughout Arnhemland, the Islands of the Top End and Darwin. Born on the banks of the Mainoru River,  Marie spent her early years growing up on Bathurst Island.

Levin A. Diatschenko was born in Sydney, and raised in Alice Springs. Though he has lived in most major cities in Australia, he resides in Darwin. His work has been referred to variously as magical realism, hard-boiled Surrealism, and mystic fable.

Kamarra Bell-Wykes is a descendant of the Jagera and Butchulla people of South East Queensland. Kamarra’sfirst play,Shrunken Iris was produced when she was twenty-two. With four works since then, Crying Shame, Mothers Tongue,Chopped Liver and Body Armour.

After decades of rubbing shoulders with fraudsters and liars, Nicholas Johnson now works as a performer, writer and consultant, educating the public about the tricks of the con artist’s trade. His live shows have featured at corporate events, schools and private events simultaneously entertaining and educating audiences about con artists and scams.

Angela Meyer is an author (Captives), editor (The Great Unknown), reviewer and literary journalist. She has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney, and has blogged for more than seven years at Literary Minded. Her fiction, articles, essays and reviews have been widely published.

Paddy O’Reilly writes novels, short stories and screenplays. She has won a number of short story awards and her stories have been published and broadcast around the world. Her books have been shortlisted for major awards as well as nominated as best books of the year in various publications. Paddy’s latest novel is The Wonders.

Sean Williams is an award-winning, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of over thirty-five novels, eighty short stories, and the odd odd poem. He lives in Adelaide with his family. On Twitter, he’s @adelaidesean, his website is seanwilliams.com and he’s also on Facebook.

Warsan Shire is the first young poet laureate for London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally – including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, America and Kenya- and her début book, ‘Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. In 2013 she won the Inaugural African Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish and Estonian. She curates and teaches classes around the art of healing through narrative and poetry.

Josephine Moon writes ‘foodie fiction’, with strong, creative women making their mark in the world. She describes her stories as ‘books like brownies’: indulgent, comforting, a treat for the senses, but filling and with chunky nuts to chew on.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean heritage. She is a spoken word poet whose essays, fiction & short stories have been published nationally, including in the Age, theBig Issue, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, and Going Down Swinging. Her spoken word has been broadcast nationally and internationally. She is the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her short fiction collection Foreign Soiland of the 2013 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize for her poem ‘nothing here needs fixing.’

Kate Fielding builds creative platforms for intercultural conversations. She is a cultural strategist, a writer of narrative non-fiction and an advocate for social change hairdressing. Kate is a 2014-2016 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow. She has worked throughout Australia, including several years living and working in very remote desert Australia. Kate has an ongoing involvement with the arts and cultural community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Kate also likes fireworks, comics and being able to find relevant information really really fast.

Designers

Alissa Dinallo, Gemma Warriner, and Zoë Sadokierski all graduated from the Visual Communication degree at the University of Technology Sydney between 2002 and 2011. Between them, they have worked for some of the biggest names in Australian graphic design and publishing and have won a bag of awards. Designing the Memory Makes Us publication is their first collaboration and based on this playful, thoughtful experience, it won’t be their last.