In Conversation with Tim Ayliffe & Michael Brissenden

The bad guys look like the good. The good must masquerade as the bad.

Fiction built on a terrifying and confronting reality.

Two journalists who spent decades reporting the world's fault lines for the ABC. Two crime novelists who found that fiction could say what the news could not. One conversation about the country they've been watching, the cracks they've been tracking, and the stories they felt compelled to write.

Tim Ayliffe and Michael Brissenden know how these things start. They know how they end. This conversation will be not dull.

About Tim

Tim Ayliffe has a particular talent – one that requires both a journalist's instincts and a novelist's nerve – for finding the fiction inside the headline. His new thriller Dark Desert Road is set in the drought-hollowed country west of Wagga Wagga, where a community of sovereign citizens has decided it is done with the rest of us. They own guns. They don't talk to cops. And they are, as it turns out, not entirely fictional.

About Michael

Michael Brissenden spent three decades as one of Australia's most respected journalists – ABC bureau chief, foreign correspondent, host of AM, political editor. He has reported from war zones, parliaments and the spaces in between. Then he started writing crime novels. One rather suspects he had been taking notes all along.

Dust is set in Lake Herrod, a town dying as its lake dries up and a fresh corpse surfaces near the cracked lakebed, a missing father turns out to be alive, and a web of corruption reaches far beyond the small community.

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