Join bestselling author, fearless memoirist and publisher of over 100 books, Melinda Ferguson, to get into the guts of writing your life. The masterclass will help you find your voice, cut through the fluff and self-deception and turn raw experience into compelling memoir. What do you reveal? Who might you infuriate with the truth? And how do you tell the truth when you’ve spent a lifetime keeping it quiet?

Melinda Ferguson burst onto the local literary scene with her chart-busting, hard-hitting memoir, Smacked: A Harrowing True Story of Addiction to Survival in 2005. Her triumphant journey from being a homeless heroin and crackhead to success, captured the nation. She has written three memoirs – Hooked, Crashed and Bamboozled – and is currently working on her next one, Terminated. In 2012, she graduated from Wits with an Honours in Publishing and went on to publish over a hundred titles, first with Jacana and then with NB Publishers. In 2025, she launched her independent publishing house that hosts the imprints Melinda Ferguson Books and Ride or Die Press. Over the last decade, she has facilitated many sold-out writing workshops.