GRAEME Simsion, author of the mega-selling Rosie Project series, and his partner and co-author, Anne Buist, are setting out to visit ‘every bookshop in Australia’ – and they’re starting their tour in Gippsland.
“It’s no secret that bricks-and-mortar bookshops are struggling,” Simsion said.
“COVID didn’t help. We want to remind people that they’re an important part of our communities, particularly in regional Australia, and to thank them for the support they’ve given us in the past. And, hopefully, with talks and signings, we can help them sell a few books.”
Simsion and Buist will kick off their travels on Easter Tuesday with a signing and a writing seminar in Cowes, hosted by Turn the Page Bookshop.
From there they’ll drop into bookshops in Korumburra and Warragul, before finishing the day with an ‘in conversation’ at Traralgon Library hosted by Readers’ Emporium.
Next day it’s a lunch event with Lakes Books and Games and an evening talk organised by The Book Orchard in Bairnsdale. In their 1999 Toyota Prado, emblazoned with their tour logo, they hope to hold that pace for four months and more than four hundred bookshops.
For Simsion, it’s all about supporting the bookshops.
Buist has an additional motivation.
She’s a professor of psychiatry – chair of women’s mental health at the University of Melbourne – and their new novel, The Glass House, is set in a (fictional) mental health service.
“Most mental health stories and memoirs are told from the patient’s point of view, which is a good thing, but it’s important to show the doctors, nurses and administrators as well. Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t exactly a balanced representation of people doing a tough job in difficult conditions, and usually with good intentions,” Buist said.
Buist is keen to get mental health workers along to the book events to share drinks and stories and ‘celebrate a book that celebrates what we do.’
Simsion and Buist are donating all royalties from books sold at the events to mental health organisations.
The Glass House, which will be launched a few days before the tour starts, has been given the nod by prominent psychiatrists: words of praise from Australian of the Year Professor Pat McGorry adorn the cover. But there are also commendations from writers with lived experience.
“We’re delighted to have Heidi Everett, author of the memoir My Friend Fox, about living with schizophrenia, doing the opening reading at the launch,” Buist said.
Mental health activist Yenn Purkis will interview them in Canberra: that relationship goes back to the Rosie Project series and Purkis’s advocacy for the autistic community.
Will they make it?
It’s a daunting journey, not only in distance and time, but for sheer number of events, approaching a hundred.
“We’ll do our best,” Simsion said.
Time will tell if they make it to the last two bookshops, in Broome.
“We’ll definitely get as far as Gippsland,” Simsion said.
The tour itinerary is at greataustralianbookshoptour.com.au/itinerary.
