In a noisy digital age, making your opinions count is a rare skill. How do our best critics keep the cultural conversation classy, while competing against the world’s most clickable cat videos? And how can emerging critics get in on the action? 

Join Linda Jaivin in discussion with Junkee’s Steph Harmon, world class rabble-rouser Helen Razer and music critic Bernard Zuel as they discuss the future of criticism in a multi-platform world.

The inaugural Geraldine Pascall Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented after the panel discussion.

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Steph Harmon

Steph is the managing editor of Junkee.com, a pop culture, politics and comment site that launched in 2014. Prior to that, she was editor of music streetpress The Brag; she has written for The Guardian Australia, Time Out, and The Music Network, and tweets from@stephharmon.

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Linda Jaivin – Moderator

Linda is the author of eleven books, including seven novels. She is also an essayist, cultural commentator, playwright, and literary translator from Chinese with a specialty in film subtitling. Her novel The Infernal Optimist, about immigration detention, was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her most recent books are the travel companion Beijing, the novel The Empress Lover and the Quarterly Essay Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World. She lives in Sydney.

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Helen Razer

For much of the 1990s Helen presented the Breakfast program on Triple J with Mikey Robins. 
She has been employed as a contributor by The Age and The Australian and is now a columnist with Crikey and The Big Issue, and a correspondent for The Saturday Paper. Helen has produced four previous books of humorous nonfiction, had a rest and returned to collaborate with her friend Bernard Keane to write her only serious work to date A Short History of Stupid.

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Bernard Zuel

Bernard didn’t fall into writing so much as realising it, and music, were the reasons he got up in the morning. After beginning as a freelance critic and writer on film, TV, comedy and music for magazines he moved to the Sydney Morning Herald in the early 90s and is now the senior music writer and critic for the Herald, The Age and Fairfax online, as well as a regular commentator on music and arts for radio and TV. And he still gets up each morning for writing and music.

**The Pascall Prize "Critic of the Year" will not be awarded in 2015 as its Rules & Conditions are currently under review. The Foundation plans to present a reconfigured Pascall Prize in 2016.

As part of the 2015 Sydney Writers' Festival, the Geraldine Pascall Foundation will announce the inaugural Geraldine Pascall Lifetime Achievement Award.

> via pascallprize.org