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Please join Oliver Mol for a night of celebration, performance and literature as he launches his critically acclaimed memoir, Train Lord.
‘An intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality’ The Times
‘As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. A beautiful book’ Guardian
‘Raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny’ Saga Magazine
‘A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life and the methods we use to escape both’ Adelaide Fringe
What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bear it any longer?
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Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started.
For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who could no longer write, and a person who could no longer communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.
His doctors couldn’t figure out how to fix him. He suffered a breakdown. And one evening, high on painkillers, Oliver Googled the only thing he could think of: ‘full-time job, no experience, Sydney’. An ad for a train guard appeared and, desperate, Oliver took it.
For two years Oliver watched others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.
Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.
Oliver Mol was the inaugural winner of the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, and is currently a Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose through the Australian Council for the Arts. In 2020, a ‘Train Lord’ stage show won a best theatre award at Adelaide Fringe and proved a runaway success with a sold out season at the Sydney Fringe Festival. Oliver grew up dividing his time between Texas and Australia, and now lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.