Please join Leanne for a chat with author Kevin Radley at our Port Macquarie Library on Wednesday 26th March at 4.30pm.
Welcome back Kevin!
While navigating his Kombi van around Australia in the early 1980’s, working and writing along the way, Kevin collided with a bull near the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia. He spent the dry season working in one of the two pubs in town. It was there that he wrote about the characters he encountered in a collection of short stories.
When he returned to Sydney, Kevin used samples of his stories in a successful application to join the team of story-liners for a new television series, ‘Neighbours’. He worked in this capacity until the program was cut by Channel Seven and picked up by Channel Ten.
Whilst maintaining an interest in writing, he threw himself wholeheartedly into a teaching career, nurturing a passion for delivering creative science lessons to his students. He taught in schools of the Nepean Valley for more than 30 years. During the final two years of teaching in the region, he wrote his first novel, ‘The Teacher’s Secrets’.
In 2019, he moved with his wife to the mid-north coast of New South Wales, where he taught on a casual basis for a year while writing his second novel, a work of contemporary fiction, ‘Thundersong’. Kevin retired from teaching in 2021 to focus on writing his third novel, a work of historical fiction, ‘Rabbit Town’, published by Contempo Publishing, 2024.
Kevin has published a reworking of his original teaching memoir, ‘Teacher Fella’ and currently has a work of contemporary fiction titled ‘The Baobab Tree’ being represented by his literary agent. He is now working on the memoir of a mid-north coast man who was institutionalised from the age of four until eighteen and subjected to the most awful abuse. That work is expected to be finished at a time to coincide with final court rulings for one of the main perpetrators.
TEACHER FELLA by Kevin Radley
When a young teacher embarks upon his career, the realities of the classroom hit him like a bucket of cold water. ‘Teacher Fella’ is a memoir set against the backdrop of three western Sydney high schools from 1986 until 2019, juxtaposed with the demands of a hectic family life.
In a deeply personal account, he rides the roller coaster of teaching and parenting. Some episodes are of uplifting joy and hilarity. Countering this are times of despair and gut-wrenching heartache. When he sees fragments of his own life in the kids he teaches, he is forced to suppress a dark figure from his own childhood. Can the power of forgiveness, be enough to pull him through?
‘Teacher Fella’ shines a light upon a complex profession. It is a fitting tribute to teachers everywhere, and to all those who play a role in nurturing our youth.
