Artist Talk: Louise Helfgott
Thistledown Seed, Louise's latest book ~ why she wrote it and its relevance
Time & Location
22 Sept 2025, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm AWST
Stirling Libraries Inglewood, 895 Beaufort St, Inglewood WA 6052, Australia
About the event
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Louise Helfgott is an award-winning writer with a PhD in Creative Writing. She has had an extensive body of work published and plays produced.
Her book, Thistledown Seed was shortlisted in the WA Premier’s Book Awards for Book of the Year in 2023, and shortlisted in the Dorothy Hewett Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2018. Recent achievements include Light in her Eye which won the Todhunter Literary Award in 2014, performed at the Perth Fringe Festival in 2018. Her play Potchnagoola was commissioned and performed for the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Prichard’s death in 2019. Frames was short-listed in the national Playwriting Australia competition and produced by Class Act Theatre at the Subiaco Arts Centre in 2014.
ABOUT THE TALK
Louise will talk about her latest book, “Thistledown Seed”: what the book is about, how it's structured, why she wrote it and its relevance.
In this deeply moving account, Louise Helfgott explores another side of her family’s tragic past made famous in the Oscar-winning movie, Shine. Thistledown Seed is a powerful, moving, if forgiving exploration of hearts so frozen with emotion that their capacity to cripple is seemingly unbounding – a searing, yet beguiling record of one of the most painful journeys into adulthood I have read.”
