Accomplished author and activist Sharyn Munro will visit Cessnock City Library in November to talk about her first fiction book Peeping through my fingers.
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Her fourth book, Peeping is a collection of short stories linked by brief commentaries on her own evolving life, as candid as her non-fiction readers have come to expect.
Many of these stories are award-winners, but only available in literary journals or anthologies, so are here brought together for the first time, under the theme of 'Childhood, old age ... and the dangerous bits in between'.
Ms Munro lived for decades in a solar-powered mudbrick cabin on her remote mountain wildlife refuge in the Upper Hunter, and now resides on the Mid North Coast.
The very different Rich Land, Wasteland - how coal is killing Australia (2012) arose from her empathy with the people and places of the nearby Hunter Valley being devastated from runaway opencut coalmining.
That national exposé kept her so involved in the fights of such people that she had to forego any fictional writing.
In recent years she has been most deeply involved in the legal fight of The Bimblebox Alliance to stop Clive Palmer's Waratah Coal from turning the 8000ha Bimblebox Nature Refuge into a coal mine.
Ms Munro felt that their historic win in November 2022 was a good time to allow herself to refocus on her fiction.
In 2014 she received the NSW Nature Council's Dunphy Award for The Most Outstanding Environmental Effort of an Individual'.
Since then, Ms Munro has gone on to engage with groups such as the Manning Clean Water Action Group, and has been involved in battles of communities against coal and gas.
In Gloucester she was arrested after locking on to an AGL gate.
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A few health scares have made her determined to reclaim her creative path, and the Peeping through my fingers collection is the first result.
These short stories will delight readers as she turns from observing her wild animal neighbours to write about her fellow humans in their hopeful stumble through time - 'life'.
Having turned 75, she aims to use her way with words for both storytelling and activism.
"Our world needs both - to understand life and to save it," Ms Munro said.
Being a grandmother of five, as long as she is able she will not cease to strive to better the future for all.
Peeping through my fingers can be purchased at the author talk at Cessnock Library on Thursday, November 16 from 5.30pm to 6.30pm.
The novel, along with all her books can also be found on www.sharynmunro.com.
Visit Cessnock City Library's website for more information.
