Join us at Riverbend where we present our new series of events : Ask The Author

At these events, the audience become the interviewers!

Fiona Stager will be on hand to moderate this event with Steve MinOn, at which you are invited to ask the author any questions you may have about his book and his writing process. Guests are encouraged to read Steve’s fantastic novel, First Name Second Name, prior to the event, but are of course welcome to come along with no prior knowledge of the book if they wish.

Join us for what promises to be a fascinating evening!

About the book…

The journey will be long and difficult, one thousand miles. Try not to be too obvious. Stick to the backroads. You'll know you've arrived when you get there.

Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen's corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there?

His journey, as a kind of jiangshi, takes him back through his turbulent family history- from his Chinese great-grandfather's life on the goldfields in 1860s Queensland, to his Scottish grandparents' migration to Australia as ten-pound Poms, and to his own coming of age and coming out in Brisbane and London.

Original and satirical, First Name Second Name follows four generations of one family through a reckoning with racial, familial and sexual identity.

About the author…

Steve MinOn was an internationally awarded advertising copywriter and a restaurateur before becoming a writer of fiction. He grew up in North Queensland and he now lives in Meanjin/Brisbane. Steve has written often about outsiders and his family’s mixed-race ancestral history, and his articles and short stories have been published in SBS Voices, Mamamia and various anthologies. He won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer in the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards for First Name Second Name.