ANU/THE CANBERRA TIMES MEET THE AUTHOR

Anna Krien will be in conversation with Will Steffen to discuss her new book, Quarterly Essay 66, The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia's Climate Deadlock, which explores the psychology and politics of a warming world. She visits frontlines in Australia's climate wars - the Great Barrier Reef, South Australia, the Coalition party room. She looks at the global state of play. Talking to coal workers and scientists, lobbyists and activists, she considers where climate change is taking us, and assesses where effective action is to be found.

About the speakers

Anna Krien's first book, Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award. Her second book, Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, described as a "balanced yet fearless" investigation into the darkest recesses of sporting culture, won the 2014 UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year. Her previous Quarterly Essay was Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals.

Anna's work has also been published in the Monthly, the Age, the Big Issue, Griffith Review and has been included in The Best Australian Essays and The Best Australian Stories.

Professor Will Steffen is an Earth System scientist; Councillor on the publicly-funded Climate Council of Australia; an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Canberra; and a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden. He was on the panel of experts supporting the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, has served as the Science Adviser to the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, and was chair of the Antarctic Science Advisory Committee.

From 1998 to 2004, Steffen served as Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, based in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests span a broad range within the fields of climate and Earth System science, with an emphasis on incorporation of human processes in Earth System modelling and analysis; and on sustainability and climate change.

Please register for this event online.

Book signings will take place at 6pm before the conversation and then again after. This event is free.