In this episode of Fully Lit Live, UTS alumni Judi Morison and Verity Borthwick join writer and academic Dr Claire Corbett to discuss their debut novels at the 2025 UTS Writers’ Festival.

Verity Borthwick’s Hollow Air is a psychological thriller set at a remote mining site in Far North Queensland, using isolation and an often-unseen industry to explore power, fear and uncertainty.

Judi Morison’s Secrets is a family saga spanning six decades, centred on a matriarch facing the end of her life — and a truth she has carried for sixty years — illuminating histories of incarceration, racism and intergenerational trauma.

The authors reflect on the importance of place in their storytelling, on isolation and truth-telling, and on the role UTS played in helping them develop their voices and navigate the path to publication. The episode also features readings from both novels.

Voices

Dr Claire Corbett is a writer, critic and lecturer in Creative Writing at UTS, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work spans literary criticism, essays and teaching, with a focus on contemporary literature, feminism and narrative form.

Judi Morison is a writer and UTS alumna whose debut novel Secrets is published by Bundyi, Simon & Schuster’s First Nations imprint.

Verity Borthwick is a writer and UTS alumna whose debut novel Hollow Air is published by Ultimo Press.

Recorded at The UTS Writers' Festival held on November 7, 2025, to celebrate books by UTS Creative Writing staff, alumni, and students.

Credits

Fully Lit podcast is brought to you by Impact Studios at UTS, the Sydney Review of Books, and the UTS Writing and Publishing Program, and is produced by Regina Botros.

Executive Producers: Sarah Gilbert and James Jiang.

Mixed by Siobhan Moylan & Regina Botros.

Fully Lit is made on Gadigal land.

Further reading

Critical/Mineral - Roslyn Jolly on the Australian Mining novel, a review of Verity Borthwick's Hollow Air.