Stella Day Out – In Conversation with Katia Ariel

Stella Day Out is a free one-day literary festival that celebrates and promotes the outstanding contributions of women and non-binary writers to Australian literature.

Join Katia Ariel for an intimate conversation about her 2024 Stella shortlisted debut ‘The Swift Dark Tide’ and her second novel ‘Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch’. Moving between love and loss, memory and myth, Ariel’s work navigates the deep waters of human connection with lyricism and courage.

The Swift Dark Tide – What happens when, in the middle of a happy heterosexual marriage, a woman falls in love with another woman?

Part memoir, part love letter, The Swift Dark Tide is also a chronicle of life by the sea, journeying between Melbourne’s St Kilda and the Black Sea town of Odessa. Katia Ariel introduces you to a lineage of soulful, strident women and beautifully nuanced men. She invites you into home and heart to witness love, loss and joy, motherhood, daughterhood and the urgent wildness of the body.

Katia Ariel (she/her) is an award-winning author, book editor and educator from Melbourne/Naarm. She was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Her memoir, The Swift Dark Tide, shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2024 and won the 2024 Society of Women Writers New South Wales Non-fiction Prize.