Lauren Groff: The Vaster Wilds

After smash-hit Fates and Furies, the modern-day marriage story that was Barack Obama’s book of the year in 2015, Lauren Groff’s novels have looked to the past to understand the present.

Her latest historical novel, The Vaster Wilds, is set on the edge of the New World at an unnamed British settlement in the Americas. Fleeing violence, disease and starvation, a servant girl enters the wilderness alone. This spirited survivalist story has been critically acclaimed as “exhilarating” (The Guardian), “visionary” (The Observer) and “timeless” (The Times).

Join Lauren and host Melanie Kembrey as they explore this prophetic novel, which encapsulates the story of America in miniature.


Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix and The Vaster Wilds and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize, an American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Book Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and has been a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. Her books have been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Melanie Kembrey has been a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald for more than a decade and is currently editor of arts and culture publication Spectrum. She is also co-host of the pop culture podcast The Drop.

This event is presented in partnership with Sydney Writers’ Festival.