Adelaide Writers' Week: Recent Episodes
Adelaide Writers' Week
With Sarah Martin | Kate Morton is one of Australia’s best-selling authors. A fascination with secrets and their impact has shaped her writing. She explains why to Sarah Martin.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 5:00pm
With Susan Johnson | 'Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue' is the stating point for Clementine Ford's case against marriage. She explains to Susan Johnson why she believes marriage is an institution that is passé, oppressive and against women's interests.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 5:00pm
With Jo Case | Author Catharine Lumby knew Frank Moorhouse for many years. A decade before his death in 2022, Moorhouse asked her to be his biographer. In conversation with Jo Case, Lumby shares how this relationship influenced her approach.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 3:45pm
With Amanda Vanstone | Umut Özkırımlı, the author of Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke, joins Amanda Vanstone to discuss the question: “What do evangelical Christians, far right Trump supporters and the woke Left have in common? They all burn books, and in fact they burn the same books. But book burning - or other forms of cancelling - is not simply an act of protest. It does not seek justice; it calls for retribution and revenge. And there is nothing progressive about this dogmatic and fanatical activism”.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 3:45pm
With Mike Ladd | Omar Sakr is an award-winning poet and novelist. His latest collection, Non-Essential Work, confronts issues of gender, race and identity. He explores these concerns with Mike Ladd.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 2:30pm
With Helen Elliott | Una Mannion’s second novel, Tell Me What I Am, is a superbly literary novel masquerading as a compelling thriller. In conversation with Helen Elliott, Mannion asks how we know who we are.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 2:30pm
With Jo Case | Brooklyn and Jerusalem are places that have powerfully informed the recent writing of two leading American writers – Jonathan Lethem and Nathan Thrall. Join them in conversation with Jo Case.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 1:15pm
With Hannah Kent | Myfanwy Jones, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted author of Leap, has just published a new novel about fathers, sons and the damage that can ripple through generations. She discusses the writing process with Hannah Kent.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 1:15pm
With Annabelle Quince | Ilan Pappé is one of the most influential historians writing today on the history of Israel and Palestine. He joins Annabelle Quince via live stream to explain why context matters.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 12:00pm
With Nicole Abadee | Anna Funder’s Wifedom shines a light on the woman who George Orwell described as his wife thirty-seven times without ever using her name. Eileen O’Shaughnessy has now been written back into history, as Funder explains to Nicole Abadee.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 12:00pm
With Sarah Martin | Polly Toynbee has been a columnist for The Guardian for over twenty-five years. In conversation with Sarah Martin, Toynbee speaks about her new memoir and its exploration of class in Britain, social justice and the effects of privilege.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 10:45am
With Louise Adler and Sian Cain | By exploring an episode of her own life in the context of a residential creative writing course, Miranda France examines how and why we tell our own stories in The Writing School. Can writing be taught? Louise Adler joins Sian Cain to test this proposition and discuss France's work.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 10:45am
With Tory Shepherd | Women have long been written out of history, marginalised and ignored. Tory Shepherd interviews Sarah Watling about the remarkable women writers who went to Spain to fight fascism in the 1930s.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 9:30am
With Lucia Sorbera | Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and his most recent work has focused on engaged writers. He tells Lucia Sorbera why he chose to write a biography of Frantz Fanon at this moment.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 9:30am
With Annabelle Quince | Understanding the Middle East conflict requires us to consider the origins of Hamas: the organisation, its political ambitions and relationship to the Palestinian polity. Tareq Baconi, the author of Hamas Contained, explains the background and context to Annabelle Quince.
Event details: Thu 07 Mar, 8:15am
Evelyn Araluen, Madison Godfrey, Jill Jones and Ellen van Neerven with Jessica Alice | Join renowned Australian poets Evelyn Araluen, Madison Godfrey, Jill Jones and Ellen van Neerven with chair Jessica Alice for an exploration of poetry as a tool for resistance and social transformation.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 5:00pm
With Anne Pender | Susan Johnson is a brave writer. She is also a brave daughter. Johnson tells Anne Pender why and how she decided to bring her elderly mother to live with her on a Greek island.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 5:00pm
Kate Grenville, Susan Johnson, Una Mannion and Pip Williams with David Marr | Have you ever wondered what happens during a book tour? Kate Grenville, Susan Johnson, Una Mannion and Pip Williams join chair David Marr to give you the scoop as they share stories from their own book tours across Australia and around the world.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 3:45pm
With Beejay Silcox | Helen Elliott, a wonderfully perceptive literary critic, finally decided to write a memoir – a letter to eleven people who influenced her life. She explains why to Beejay Silcox.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 2:30pm
Ali Cobby Eckermann, Brad Darkson, Dominic Guerrera and Karen Wyld | What remains after colonisation? After heartbreak? After protest? Like the rocks, First Peoples remain. Co-editors and contributors of The Rocks Remain anthology discuss continuation and the power of story. Ali Cobby Eckermann, Brad Darkson, Dominic Guerrera, and Karen Wyld in-conversation.
Supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 2:30pm
With Sarah L'Estrange | Jonathan Lethem is a genre agnostic – from sci-fi to detective fiction. He explains to Sarah L’Estrange why he likes books in all their “homely actuality”.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 1:15pm
With Rachel Perkins | David Marr confronts uncomfortable truths with his customary courage and acuity in a conversation with Rachel Perkins.
Supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 1:15pm
With Jo Case | Lynne Malcolm spent many years presenting Radio National’s All in the Mind. Now she has distilled all she has learned in a book about neuroscience, psychiatry, mental health and human behaviour. She explores the issues with Jo Case.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 12:00pm
With Nicole Abadee | Kate Grenville has been delighting readers since her very first collection, Bearded Ladies, was published in 1984. Nicole Abadee takes the opportunity to talk to Grenville about her oeuvre.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 12:00pm
With Lisa Temple | Susanna Moore joins Lisa Temple via live stream to talk about her new novel, The Lost Wife, her memoir and ‘that novel’ – In the Cut.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 10:45am
With Jane Howard | Pip Williams, best-selling author of The Dictionary of Lost Words, tells Jane Howard about her new novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho – an encomium to the art and craft of making books.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 10:45am
With Sian Cain | Today the Spanish Civil War is remembered through writers like George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway. Anna Funder and Sarah Watling join Sian Cain to explore the stories of the courageous women who have been written out of this history.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 9:30am
With Nicole Abadee | Blake Morrison advises memoirists to remember god is in the details. Nicole Abadee tests this advice with Martin Flanagan and Polly Toynbee.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 9:30am
With John Lyons | Bruce Wolpe has spent years studying America’s political culture, leadership and global relationships – from Asia to Israel, Albanese to Putin, and everything in between. Joining John Lyons via live stream, Wolpe explores the national and international tensions now in play.
Event details: Wed 06 Mar, 8:15am
With Vikki Wakefield | Gary Lonesborough’s award-winning debut, The Boy From The Mish, is a powerful coming-of-age story. His follow-up, We Didn’t Think It Through, offers a nuanced exploration of life inside ‘juvie’. Join us at YA night for a conversation between Lonesborough and Vikki Wakefield.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 7:30pm
With Margot McGovern | Across her YA series, Lynette Noni has created a host of memorable characters that fans care for deeply. She speaks with Margot McGovern about how to hold a reader’s attention and create relationships that can span many years.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 6:30pm
With Sian Cain | Racism and sexism continue to plague Australian sporting codes despite multiple reviews, diversity policies and courageous outspoken sports people. Ellen van Neerven explains the impasse to Sian Cain.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 5:00pm
With DreamYard International Poetry Exchange Program | Join chair Ellen Hagan and teen poets from Australia, South Korea and the United States as they compete for the title of International High School Poetry Champions.
Supported by the United States Embassy.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 5:00pm
With Helen Elliott | With the publication of her first book, Eliza Clark was named one of Granta magazine’s best British novelists under forty. Her new novel’s protagonist is the unreliable narrator of a true crime, reimagined as crime fiction. Clark is joined by Helen Elliott.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 5:00pm
With Rick Sarre | The voice of nightly radio for legions of fans, Peter Goers has been called “the critic who ate Adelaide”. He discusses his latest book, a memoir about his parents’ death in the crash of Pan Am Flight 759, with Rick Sarre.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 3:45pm
With David Marr | In Nicholas Jose’s latest novel, East Timor’s fight for independence provides the context for a story about the intersection of the personal and the political. He explores with David Marr the pleasure and anxieties of writing a literary thriller.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 3:45pm
With Amanda Vanstone | When Muster Dogs first hit screens, the lively kelpie pups adopted into farming homes across Australia became instant stars. Lisa Millar tells Amanda Vanstone about her new book, why the TV show resonated with audiences and its impact on her own life.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 3:45pm
Calling all twitchers for a conversation about Getting to Know the Birds in Your Neighbourhood and Birds with Personality between Georgia Angus and Darryl Jones.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 2:30pm
With Sarah L'Estrange | Rachael Mead speaks with Sarah L’Estrange about the challenges of turning from poetry to fiction, reflecting on her latest novel, The Art of Breaking Ice.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 2:30pm
With Claire Nichols | Miles Franklin winner Melissa Lucashenko joins The Book Show’s Claire Nichols for a discussion about her new novel, Edenglassie, and white Australia’s amnesia regarding our collective history.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 2:30pm
With Sian Cain | Madison Godfrey describes their second poetry collection as a document of a decade of performing womanhood. The poems are about music, fandom, gender and desire. Godfrey discusses prose poetry with Sian Cain.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 1:15pm
With Nicole Abadee | Anne Michaels, the acclaimed novelist and poet, joins Nicole Abadee via live stream for a conversation about writing, structure and the past.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 1:15pm
John Lyons, Ilan Pappé, Nathan Thrall and Bruce Wolpe with Debbie Whitmont | Edward Said described Palestinians as “the victims’ victims”. Walkley Award-winning journalist John Lyons, preeminent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé (live stream), Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, and political insider Bruce Wolpe (live stream) discuss the implications of this historical reality with Debbie Whitmont.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 1:15pm
Royce Kurmelovs, Tory Shepherd and Ben Stubbs with Smriti Daniel | From reporting on the far right to journeys in the Paraguay jungle, join award-winning journalists Royce Kurmelovs, Tory Shepherd and Ben Stubbs for a deep dive into the risks and rewards of immersive storytelling, with Smriti Daniel.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 12:00pm
Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Richard King, Kate Mildenhall and Tracey Spicer with Ariel Bogle | Can AI produce literature? Writers are demanding protection against tech companies using their work without permission or compensation. Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Richard King, Kate Mildenhall and Tracey Spicer discuss the fate of the author with Ariel Bogle.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 12:00pm
With Jonathan Green | In a writing life spanning over forty years, Jane Smiley has published seventeen novels, two short story collections, five non-fiction books and eight young adult novels. She tells Jonathan Green why she believes novelists are always working in a time of turmoil.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 12:00pm
Melanie Ostell, Vanessa Radnidge and Jeanne Ryckmans with Jessica Alice | From bidding wars to MFA wunderkinds, publishers see it all. Go behind the scenes with Melanie Ostell, Vanessa Radnidge and Jeanne Ryckmans to answer all your curly questions about the world of writing and publishing, with Jessica Alice.
Presented in partnership with Writers SA.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 10:45am
With David Marr | Only Peter Goldsworthy could write a memoir titled The Cancer Finishing School. He explains to David Marr why cancer makes good copy for a writer.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 10:45am
With Natasha Mitchell | Mental illness is stigmatised, economic rationalism determines government funding, and the industry is dominated by big pharma. Natasha Mitchell asks Patrick McGorry and Jonathan Rosen why we continue to fail our most vulnerable citizens.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 10:45am
Madison Godfrey, Kate Grenville and Anjum Hasan with Jessica Alice | Join Madison Godfrey, Kate Grenville and Anjum Hasan for an intimate exploration of the other great partnership in life – the author-editor relationship – that takes writing from the deeply personal to the public stage, with Jessica Alice.
Presented in partnership with Writers SA.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 9:30am
With Andrew Clark | After his magisterial biography of Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson has turned his attention to the trial of Marshall Petain – France’s shield or Nazi collaborator? He is joined by Andrew Clark.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 9:30am
With Ariel Bogle | Award-winning short story writer Ted Chiang is often described as a humanist sci-fi writer. Ariel Bogle asks him what that means and why he sees AI as another of “capital’s willing executioners”. Chiang appears via live stream.
Event details: Tue 05 Mar, 9:30am
For more than twenty years, Insiders has been unmissable television for political tragics and anyone wanting to stay up to date on federal politics. Host David Speers returns to Adelaide Writers’ Week to speak with the Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, and a panel of Australia’s sharpest minds as they dissect the week in politics. They’ll be joined by Mike Bowers and one of the country’s finest cartoonists for Talking Pictures.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 6:30pm
With Eleanor Jackson, Cheryl Leavy, Yves Rees and Beejay Silcox | Be among the first to discover the 2024 Stella Prize longlist. Join the Judging Panel – Eleanor Jackson, Cheryl Leavy, Yves Rees and Beejay Silcox – for an illuminating discussion about the best literature produced in Australia.
Supported by Stella Forever Fund and Copyright Agency.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 5:00pm
With Debbie Whitmont | Historian Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew combines a fascinating family story of moving from Baghdad to Israel with a historical account of Iraqi Jews during an especially calamitous period. Shlaim joins via live stream for this conversation with Debbie Whitmont.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 5:00pm
With Tom Wright | Rupert Murdoch has dominated the media for more than half a century. Walter Marsh takes Tom Wright back to his beginnings in Adelaide, when the “boy publisher” took over News Limited and The News at the age of twenty-two.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 5:00pm
Anjali Joseph, Meena Kandasamy, Perumal Murugan and Nilanjana S. Roy with Roanna Gonsalves | Anjali Joseph, Meena Kandasamy, Perumal Murugan and Nilanjana S. Roy join Roanna Gonsalves for a conversation about the challenge of writing about gender, caste and class within India’s rich, complex and diverse literary culture.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 3:45pm
The MUD Literary Prize celebrates a debut novel of literary fiction. Hear from 2024 winner Kylie Needham and chair David Sly as they discuss Needham's book, Girl in a Pink Dress.
Eliza Clark, Patrick deWitt and Jonathan Lethem with Molly Murn | Three of life’s certainties are brought into question by Eliza Clark, Patrick deWitt and Jonathan Lethem in a conversation hosted by Molly Murn.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 3:45pm
With Roanna Gonsalves | In 2015, Perumal Murugan said: “Perumal Murugan the writer is dead. As he is not god, he is not going to resurrect himself. He also has no faith in rebirth. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone.” Join Murugan and chair Roanna Gonsalves to find out why he changed his mind.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 2:30pm
With Ruth Mackenzie | Writing about the impoverished village of his childhood and the ramifications of disenfranchisement on his family, Édouard Louis is routinely described as France’s literary sensation. In conversation with Ruth Mackenzie.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 2:30pm
With Debbie Whitmont | Drawing on a decade spent as the director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli Project, Nathan Thrall’s new book is an extraordinary micro-history that illuminates the reality of daily life in Palestine. He speaks with Debbie Whitmont.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 2:30pm
With John Zubrzycki | Set in a north Indian village, Nilanjana S. Roy’s new novel, Black River, takes the form of a police procedural to ask larger questions about the ‘new India’. Roy explores the novel’s themes with John Zubrzycki.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 1:15pm
With Bob Carr | The modern view is that we can’t judge the actions of others in extremis, so what can we learn from Marshal Petain, Heinrich Himmler’s masseuse or the Mata Hari of the Orient? Bob Carr discusses collaboration with writer Ian Buruma (live stream) and historian Julian Jackson.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 1:15pm
With Chris Taylor | William McInnes may be known to television audiences for his role in SeaChange, but his books have also won him legions of fans. He tells Chris Taylor about his latest work – a celebration of our very particular way with words.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 1:15pm
With Roanna Gonsalves | Poet, novelist and activist Meena Kandasamy has been described as a “one-woman agit prop literary-political movement”. She discusses the politics of writing with Roanna Gonsalves.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 12:00pm
With Beejay Silcox | Richard Ford says: “I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere. I read only to learn something and to be delighted by it.” Ford explains the pleasure of writing and reading short stories to Beejay Silcox.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 12:00pm
With Susan Johnson | Marriage, according to Devorah Baum, is a "formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal”. Join us to explore this perplexing institution, which continues to shape and carry our human story, with Baum (via live stream) and chair Susan Johnson.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 12:00pm
With John Zubrzycki | Anjum Hasan asks what happens if people cling to the once vaunted qualities of irresponsible dreaming, intellectual pride, ethical doubt or love of language. Hasan and John Zubrzycki talk about the loneliness of the thinking person in present times.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 10:45am
Mark Brandi, Una Mannion and Lucy Treloar with Tom Wright | Are there rules that govern writing historical fiction, crime fiction or coming-of-age stories? Mark Brandi, Una Mannion and Lucy Treloar join Tom Wright for a discussion about the limits and possibilities of genre writing.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 10:45am
With Sarah Kanowski | Jonathan Rosen tells Sarah Kanowski about his book The Best Minds – a heartbreaking story of friendship, madness and the tragedy of good intentions.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 10:45am
With Claire Nichols | Anjali Joseph’s fourth novel, Keeping in Touch, involves magical lightbulbs, contemporary art and toxic bachelors. Joseph explores the challenges of writing a modern love story with Claire Nichols.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 9:30am
With Katrina Strickland | In 2021, Chanel Contos asked young Australian women about their sexual experiences – the responses were horrifying and the demand for change indisputable. She discusses her findings and her book with Katrina Strickland.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 9:30am
With Richard Fidler | Wendy Harmer’s memoir is the extraordinary story of a life lived in public – undaunted by naysayers, sexism and adversity. She shares her story with her dear friend and colleague Richard Fidler.
Event details: Mon 04 Mar, 9:30am
Tom Rehn and Lauren DeCesare from Hello SA announce the winner of the 2024 Microstory Competition. Supported by Hello SA, this year's competition invited young people aged under 18 to submit a story with a focus on the following question: what does it mean to be human? Hear the winner read their story in this recording.
Madison Godfrey, Sara M. Saleh, Kirli Saunders, Katherine Sortini and Rob Waters | Writers’ Week’s favourite showcase of slam poetry and spoken word returns in 2024 with performances from poets including Madison Godfrey, Sara M. Saleh, Kirli Saunders, Katherine Sortini and Australian Poetry Slam Champion Rob Waters.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 5:00pm
With Sarah Kanowski | British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says we spend most of our lives anxiously hoping we will change – and doing everything we can to stop this happening. He joins Sarah Kanowski via live stream to discuss “the unexamined life”.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 5:00pm
Alan Rusbridger, Justin Stevens and Lenore Taylor with Laura Tingle | Publishing unverified information has seemingly become routine – hence the creation of Verify, a new BBC News initiative. Alan Rusbridger (live stream), Justin Stevens and Lenore Taylor join Laura Tingle to discuss the future of news.
Supported by the Friends of the ABC.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 5:00pm
With Glyn Davis | In conversation with Glyn Davis, the bestselling author of The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan, explores the impact of environmental change across the arc of human history.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 3:45pm
With Leigh Sales | Richard Glover’s latest book is a hilarious manual for how to make the world a better place, “one wish at a time” – which occasionally includes the use of a leaf blower. In conversation with Leigh Sales.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 3:45pm
Evelyn Araluen, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jazz Money and Ellen van Neerven | In conjunction with the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, poets Evelyn Araluen, Jazz Money and Ellen van Neerven share their work and speak with Ali Cobby Eckermann about imagination, community and creating sanctuaries.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 2:30pm
Mary Beard with Jonty Claypole | Mary Beard, one of the world’s most famous classicists, talks to Jonty Claypole about bringing the past to life. As the author of over twenty books and numerous television documentaries, Beard has fought to keep the classics in the mainstream. Over her career, this has involved breaking the glass ceiling, reinvigorating public service broadcasting and embracing the power – as well as the perils – of social media. She tells (almost) all about the highs and lows of public intellectualism in the 21st century.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 2:30pm
With Clare Sawyer | In 2024, Jessica Townsend will publish the fourth book in her Nevermoor series. What can we expect from the next instalment? In this session for middle grade readers, Townsend joins chair Clare Sawyer to reveal some of the secrets of her fantastical world.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 1:15pm
Richard Beasley, Margaret Cook, Sarah Hanson-Young and Kate McBride with Natasha Mitchell | The relationship between rivers and the communities and cities that grow around them is a complex one. Richard Beasley, Margaret Cook, Sarah Hanson-Young, Kate McBride and chair Natasha Mitchell explore the challenges and opportunities associated with balancing development and our natural river ecosystems.
This session is presented in partnership with The Australia Institute.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 1:15pm
With Claire Nichols | Anne Enright’s eighth novel is a brilliant report on one unhappy family; an intergenerational tale framed by the self-aggrandising legacy of the poet-father. Join the author in conversation with Claire Nichols.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 1:15pm
With Nicole Abadee | Prima Facie is the story of a brilliant barrister who finds herself defenceless after she is sexually abused. Suzie Miller discusses the problem of speaking out with Nicole Abadee.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 12:00pm
Susan Close, Royce Kurmelovs, Noah Schultz-Byard and Tory Shepherd with Jules Schiller | Whether it’s the establishment of a First Nations Voice to Parliament or the installation of the Tesla Big Battery, South Australia often leads the way. Susan Close, Royce Kurmelovs, Noah Schultz-Byard and Tory Shepherd talk with Jules Schiller about why SA stands as a beacon of policy creativity.
This session is presented in partnership with The Australia Institute.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 12:00pm
With Lisa Millar | Two of our most highly regarded journalists, Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar, discuss their decades-long friendship, the art of storytelling and life lessons from thirty years at the front line of journalism.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 12:00pm
With Georgina Godwin | Kathy Lette is a master – or should that be a mistress? – of the pun, the quip, the barb. Over seventeen books, Lette has documented modern life in all its ironies. She shares the joke with Georgina Godwin.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 10:45am
James Curran, Zoe Daniel and Emma Shortis with Marian Wilkinson | The US has claimed that it has “no greater ally than Australia”, however, this year it faces what may be the most important presidential election in generations. What are the risks, and the rewards, of waltzing in step with the world’s greatest superpower? Join James Curran, Zoe Daniel and Emma Shortis with Marian Wilkinson.
This session is presented in partnership with The Australia Institute.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 10:45am
With Christos Tsiolkas | Julia Baird’s latest book makes the case for grace: forgiving the unforgivable, letting go of ancient grudges, and learning generosity. She shares what life has taught her with Christos Tsiolkas.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 10:45am
With Louise Milligan | Dassi Erlich’s memoir is a devastating account of sexual abuse in the closed religious Adass community. Bringing her perpetrator to justice took over fifteen years. She shares her story with Louise Milligan.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 9:30am
Richard Denniss, Joëlle Gergis, Thomas Keneally and Yanis Varoufakis with Natasha Mitchell | Politicians and commentators frequently use jargon to disguise self-interest as national interest, to make the absurd seem inevitable or the inequitable seem fair. Richard Denniss, Joëlle Gergis, Tom Keneally and Yanis Varoufakis join Natasha Mitchell to discuss the power of speaking simply in complicated times.
This session is presented in partnership with The Australia Institute.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 9:30am
Judith Brett, Samuel Moyn and Peter Varghese with Glyn Davis | Have we abandoned the idea that citizens in an ethical society have obligations to others and the state? In these increasingly illiberal times, Glyn Davis moderates a discussion with Judith Brett, Samuel Moyn and Peter Varghese.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 9:30am
Amelia Mellor: The Grandest Bookshop in the World | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 3:20pm
Kirli Saunders: Bindi | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 2:40pm
Catherine Norton: The Fortune Makers | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 2:00pm
Alison Lester: Magic Beach | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 12:00pm
Carla Fitzgerald: How to be Prime Minister and Survive Grade Five | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 11:30am
Jason Pamment: Ember and the Island of Lost Creatures | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 11:00am
Kirli Saunders: The Incredible Freedom Machines | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 10:30am
Story Trove: The Garden at the End of the World | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 10:00am
Anna Walker: Snap! | Calling all fans of picture books, graphic novels and epic tween series! Young Readers’ Day welcomes readers aged 2-12 to Writers’ Week with a program designed to inspire the next generation of readers and storytellers.
Event details: Sun 03 Mar, 9:30am
With Karen Wyld | Award-winning human rights lawyer Sara M. Saleh explores the complexities of identity in her writing. She joins Karen Wyld to talk about her new poetry collection and her debut novel.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 5:00pm
With Nicholas Jose | Alexis Wright’s new novel is both a grand allegorical epic and a book for our times, engaging with Aboriginal sovereignty and the impact of global warming. Join the author in conversation with Nicholas Jose.
This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 5:00pm
With Charlotte Wood | Mature love is the subject of Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, The In-Between. He speaks with Charlotte Wood about intertwining the personal and political in his fiction.
This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 5:00pm
With Georgina Godwin | Towards the end of her mother’s life, Rachelle Unreich decided to document her wartime experiences in an attempt to understand her remarkable vitality and optimism. In conversation with Georgina Godwin, Unreich explains her motivation for taking on this task.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 3:45pm
With Jason Steger | Patrick deWitt has been lauded as the 21st century’s Mark Twain. He tells Jason Steger about the “not unhappy protagonist” of his latest novel and why he chose to write it in the third person.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 3:45pm
With Maxine McKew | Acclaimed journalist Nick McKenzie’s investigations are a catalogue of corruption and abuse revelations involving powerful institutions and people. His latest book tells the inside story of his investigation into Ben Roberts-Smith. In conversation with Maxine McKew.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 3:45pm
With Louise Milligan | In The Empty Honour Board, Martin Flanagan wrestles with what he remembers, what he’s forgotten and what he never knew about the boarding school he was sent to at the age of eleven. He discusses the complexities with Louise Milligan.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 2:30pm
Susan Close, Peter Frankopan and Joëlle Gergis with Marian Wilkinson | Celebrated historian Peter Frankopan, climate scientist Joëlle Gergis and Susan Close, South Australia’s Deputy Premier and Environment Minister, speak with Marian Wilkinson about the rise and fall of civilisations through the lens of dramatic weather events.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 2:30pm
With Bob Carr | Alastair Campbell’s latest book explains why politics matter in a clarion call to the next generation. He joins us at Writers’ Week in conversation with Bob Carr.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 2:30pm
With Ben Saul | An intellectual and humanist, Samuel Moyn’s work focuses on human rights and the laws of war. In conversation with Ben Saul, Moyn explains why the idea of “humane war” is not an oxymoron.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 1:15pm
With Nicole Abadee | Richard Ford’s new novel is the fifth featuring "arch-ordinary American" Frank Bascombe – a character who describes the aphorism of 'yeah-no' as "the entire human condition in two words". Ford discusses his oeuvre with Nicole Abadee.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 1:15pm
With Barbara Pocock | If the world is an algorithm, we citizens are mere cloud serfs. Yanis Varoufakis tells Barbara Pocock what killed capitalism.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 1:15pm
With Patrick Flanery | Following the huge success of his debut collection, The Boat, Nam Le challenges the expectation that his subject is inevitably ‘identity’ with his new book. He talks to Patrick Flanery about why he writes poetry.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 12:00pm
With Beejay Silcox | Charlotte Wood’s latest novel is a deeply personal account of a woman in retreat, in despair, while the world is in crisis. The author tells Beejay Silcox why she has written this novel at this moment.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 12:00pm
Thomas Keneally with Nikki Gemmell and special guests | Tom Keneally’s first book was published in 1964 and he has gifted generations of readers with a novel or a nonfiction book almost every year since. Join Keneally, chair Nikki Gemmell and guests to honour this National Treasure.Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 12:00pm
With Georgina Godwin | Set over a year on a merino wool farm in Tasmania, Maggie MacKellar’s memoir is a meditation on motherhood, family and home. Life is not easy, as MacKellar explains to Georgina Godwin.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 10:45am
Bob Carr, James Curran, Amanda Hodge, Sam Roggeveen and Peter Varghese with Maxine McKew | The Australian Labor Party has embraced AUKUS, a security arrangement that handcuffs Australia to the US. Has the government made the right call? Join Bob Carr, James Curran, Amanda Hodge (live stream), Sam Roggeveen and Peter Varghese with Maxine McKew.Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 10:45am
With Julia Baird | Internationally acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan says: “writers are no more than dancing shoes sliding between the dance and the floor.” He discusses his latest book with Julia Baird.
This session is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 10:45am
With Beejay Silcox | Literary agent turned memoirist Jeanne Ryckmans’ new work is a devastating personal detective story. Ryckmans explains to Beejay Silcox how a con artist and fantasist can dupe an intelligent and worldly woman.Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 9:30am
With Sarah L'Estrange | Robyn Davidson’s life and writing has been shaped by curiosity, restlessness and a desire to see the world. In conversation with Sarah L’Estrange, Davidson talks about why she returned to Australia.
Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 9:30am
Chair: Amanda Vanstone.
More than 50 years ago, Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food introduced the flavours of the Middle East to western readers. Long before Ottolenghi, she introduced homecooks around the world to the delights of cumin and coriander from Egypt, sumac and tamarind from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranates from Iran and harissa from Africa. Claudia Roden CBE talks about flavours and cooking at home with the Hon Amanda Vanstone AO, owner of over 500 cookbooks and a whiz with braised duck and turnips.
Event details: This conversation was not held live in front of an audience at Adelaide Writers' Week but was recorded separately.
Chair: Jo Case
A six-year-old child disappears in a dust storm in the Flinders Ranges. It’s a familiar literary trope about lost white children and reflects the anxiety in 19th century colonial Australia about the dangers of the wilderness. The same anxiety, unsurprisingly, did not accompany the Stolen Generations, forever lost to their families and cultures. In her latest novel of competing parallel narratives, The Sun Walks Down, Fiona McFarlane explores who belongs to the land and who are the interlopers.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Katrina Strickland
Wendy Whiteley has long been responsible for Brett Whiteley’s legacy, but she is also an artist in her own right and an important figure in the Australian art world. How does the role of ’keeper of the flame’ impact on the inheritor of that task? Should we separate Brett Whiteley and his behavior from his art? Ashleigh Wilson talks about his year-long conversation with Wendy Whiteley and what he discovered about one of our most iconic ’brothers of the brush’.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: Bob Carr
Louis Menand, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Metaphysical Club, tells the story of America after the Second World War in his latest book, The Free World. With references to luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, Susan Sontag and James Baldwin, Menand explores the significant cultural figures of the Cold War period, when “ideas mattered, painting mattered, movies mattered, poetry mattered".
Supported by the Consulate of the United States.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 2:30pm
Chair: Jonathan Green
In both the bestselling novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and its recently published sequel, All the Broken Places, John Boyne has taken on the difficult terrain of fictionalising the Holocaust. But how should novelists write about this period? Does historical accuracy matter? Are these contemporary novels written to stir our collective conscience or to remind us of the moral choices individuals make in dangerous times? Join us as Boyne reflects on these issues in the context of his novels for adults and younger readers.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Katrina Strickland
It seems that no one knows everything that happens in a marriage, not even the people in it. Join award-winning writer and journalist Kate Legge as she reveals what she learned about infidelity and why revenge seemed ultimately unsatisfying. In her book, Infidelity and Other Affairs, Legge explores the causes of cheating and its aftereffects on the cheater and the cheated-on. She spills the beans and shares her insights in this revealing conversation.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 12pm on the West Stage
Chair: Amy McQuire
Inala Cooper is a Yawuru woman with German and Irish heritage. In Marrul: Aboriginal Identity and the Fight for Rights, she shares a deeply personal and moving account of the impact of colonisation on her family. In this session, Cooper explores what self-determination means for First Nations people and why reconciliation is a vital step in our understanding of the forces that shaped Australia today.
Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
Chair: Caroline Overington
War, plague and catastrophic climate change are the collective terrors of modern life. Endlessly proliferating social media platforms are spaces onto which we can project and amplify our anxieties. In her latest book, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times, Brigid Delaney turns to the Stoics for answers and offers a kind of ancient Athenian self-help.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Chair: Sue Turnbull
Alexander McCall Smith is a man of many talents. An Emeritus Professor of Medical Law, he is perhaps best known for his entertaining crime books, including The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. These beloved works are just the tip of a prolific iceberg that encompasses everything from philosophy to children’s literature. In this session, he’ll turn his hand to a new task - attempting to convince crime reviewer and academic Sue Turnbull to open the untouched volume of W.H. Auden poetry she won as a school prize in 1969.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Peter Brune
The Battle of Long Tan was the deadliest battle for Australian forces in Vietnam and every ANZAC who fought there could hold his head high. Peter FitzSimons and military historian Peter Brune discuss the events leading up to that terrible battle and the long war that followed.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: Marian Wilkinson
Two of the most innovative minds in the business tell us if the energy transition plan can work in time to save our planet. Join Simon Holmes à Court, founder of Climate 200, and economist Ross Garnaut in conversation with Marian Wilkinson, a Walkley Award-winning journalist and author of The Carbon Club.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Beejay Silcox
Critic Beejay Silcox has suggested that Jane Harper’s “outback noir mega-hit The Dry kick-started a crime-writing boom… the drought blighted bush town became a genre trope: Australia’s sunburned answer to the arid cold of Scandi noir". Her subsequent novels have received international acclaim and have cemented Harper’s place in the crime genre. She joins Silcox to talk about the intersection of character, plot and landscape and what becoming an international bestseller has meant to her writing.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Chris Taylor
Acclaimed Palestinian citizen of Israel, screenwriter and novelist Sayed Kashua decided on ’voluntary exile’ in 2014. He wrote two of Israel’s most popular sitcoms, the satirical Arab Labor and The Writer, as well as a sardonic weekly column in Haaretz devoted to telling the story of Palestinians living in Israel – ironic and poignant, it is at times a dark story and at other times an absurd one. After almost 10 years living in America, Kashua talks to Chris Taylor about satire, writing and the Middle East.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Louise Milligan
Former Australian of the Year Grace Tame is a public voice and advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. She is also the author of a new memoir, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner. Tame sits down with award-winning Four Corners journalist Louise Milligan for a conversation about finding one’s voice, speaking truth to power and why sometimes only a side-eye will suffice.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Chair: Jonathan Green
Two-time winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Alex Miller is a giant of Australian literature. His latest novel, A Brief Affair, engages with one of literature’s most compelling subjects – unhappy women. He talks to journalist Jonathan Green about this deeply moving novel, the question of authenticity and the writer’s fidelity to imaginative truth.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
First Nations people in Australia and Palestinians share a history of struggle and resistance against the racism of settler colonial states. Join Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa and Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman Lorna Munro in conversation with award-winning author Karen Wyld for a discussion on resistance, survival and international solidarity. Through writing and activism, both fights have carved a voice for independence, self-determination and justice.
Presented by Writers SA.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 12:00pm on the North Stage
Chair: Patrick Flanery
Join novelist and University of Adelaide Chair of Creative Writing Patrick Flanery for an hour of reading and conversation about what it means to be studying and working as a creative writer today. The session features a line-up of emerging Adelaide writers, including celebrated memoirist Shannon Burns, psychologist and novelist Jane Turner Goldsmith, and poet and critic Gemma Parker, as well as up-andcoming young writers Alex Sutcliffe and Gillian Hagenus.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage
Writer, political activist and cultural commentator Ahdaf Soueif is the Eminence Grise of the Arab literary world. Over a 40-year career, she has published short stories, essays and a novel, The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, Soueif founded the Palestine Festival of Literature. Samah Sabawi, a Palestinian playwright and poet, joins Soueif to discuss her oeuvre and the context of her writing.
Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 9:30am on the North Stage
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Sally Hepworth, the author of The Soulmate, in conversation with Alex Lloyd, Publisher at Pan Macmillan.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Many an editor has described herself – and yes, it is usually a ’her’ – as a handmaiden to the creativity of the author. What does an author want from an editor? Should an editor be there to tell the truth, to act as a one-person cheer squad or as an intelligent interlocutor? And what is the 21st century equivalent of the editor’s blue pencil? Some of our finest editors talk with their bestselling authors about the editorial process.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 12:00pm on the North Stage
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Catherine Therese, the author of Things She Would Have Said Herself, tells editor Vanessa Radnidge, Head of Nonfiction & Literary at Hachette Australia, what she would say now.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Many an editor has described herself – and yes, it is usually a ’her’ – as a handmaiden to the creativity of the author. What does an author want from an editor? Should an editor be there to tell the truth, to act as a one-person cheer squad or as an intelligent interlocutor? And what is the 21st century equivalent of the editor’s blue pencil? Some of our finest editors talk with their bestselling authors about the editorial process.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage
ABOUT THIS SESSION
Holly Ringland, the author of The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding, in conversation with Catherine Milne, Publisher & Head of Fiction at HarperCollins Australia.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Many an editor has described herself – and yes, it is usually a ’her’ – as a handmaiden to the creativity of the author. What does an author want from an editor? Should an editor be there to tell the truth, to act as a one-person cheer squad or as an intelligent interlocutor? And what is the 21st century equivalent of the editor’s blue pencil? Some of our finest editors talk with their bestselling authors about the editorial process.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 9:30am on the North Stage
With Helen Morse / Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy
Gwen Harwood’s reputation, already stellar at the time of her death in 1995, has only grown since. Her Collected Poems includes many previously unpublished works and has been reprinted multiple times. More recently, a biography by Anne-Marie Priest and a selection of 100 poems by Harwood’s son, John, have added to her status as a national treasure. Always a deft technician, her poetry ranges from the philosophically dense to the metaphorically beautiful to the sheer irreverent – often in the same poem. It’s only fitting that another national treasure, Helen Morse, adds her voice to the unique voices, plural, of Gwen Harwood.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Kerryn Goldsworthy
When Ann-Marie Priest set out to write the first biography of renowned but notoriously elusive Australian poet Gwen Harwood, the Harwood estate declined to authorise her project. In this conversation with writer and critic Kerryn Goldsworthy, Priest canvasses both the challenges and the freedoms of writing without the approval of the literary executor and reveals the unexpected conclusion of her biographer’s journey in cordiality and friendship. This session is followed by the announcement of the recipient of the 2023 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: Paul Barclay
Join Jon Faine as he explains to journalist Paul Barclay how, as a young lawyer turned formidable ABC broadcaster, he discovered the story behind his new book, Apollo and Thelma: A True Tall Tale. Faine describes how the tale of the world’s strongest man, Apollo, and his publican sister, Thelma, has changed the way he sees the world.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sarah Kanowski
In Gail Jones’ ninth novel, the Great Fire of Salonika that broke out in August 1917 is the backdrop for a drama that weaves together actual historical figures and four fictional characters. Through the eyes of these characters, all of whom are enlisted in the medical services, we witness a very particular and local tragedy. Jones speaks with Sarah Kanowski about this timely and powerful antiwar novel.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Marian Wilkinson
The speed and severity of climate change is an alarming reality, but how bad it gets is up to us. Join us for this discussion with renowned bioethicist Peter Singer and award-winning science journalist and author Gaia Vince, whose extraordinary new book, Nomad Century, investigates the huge populations of climate refugees being created by the climate crisis.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sue Turnbull
V. I. Warshawski is a private investigator with a forensic interest in white collar crime who loves opera, dresses down, runs whenever she can, and has a passion for her two dogs. She is Sara Paretsky’s finest invention – a character of depth and complexity. Over the course of more than 20 novels, Paretsky’s depiction of V.I. has offered readers an alternative to the ’hardboiled dick’ and radically transformed the detective fiction genre. Paretsky remembers V.I. and reflects on why social justice matters.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
Chair: Jonathan Green
Amit Chaudhuri is an acclaimed essayist, musician, poet and the author of eight novels. His latest, Sojourn, is the story of an Indian academic who arrives in Berlin in 2005 and finds himself absorbed by the city. With this absorption comes the dissolution of identity and memory, as he experiences a profound identification with this otherwise foreign place. Chaudhuri talks about the relationship between history, identity and memory.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Chair: Katrina Strickland
Motherhood has forever been the repository for our deepest collective fantasies and anxieties. In an era when debates over abortion, reproductive technologies and gender politics rage, the moralism and sentimentalism around motherhood has been given renewed intensity. Esther Freud and Gina Rushton have both explored the role of mothers in their writing and continue the conversation here with Katrina Strickland.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Jonathan Green
The problem of endings is particularly acute for a master of digression. In The Last Days of Roger Federer, Geoff Dyer’s own encounter with the existential drama of late middle age is set against the late work of great artists – from Bob Dylan to John Coltrane, Annie Dillard to Giorgio de Chirico. In conversation with Jonathan Green, Dyer talks about final chapters, twilight achievements, a little about tennis and why he had to complete his latest book before Roger Federer’s retirement.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: Marian Wilkinson
The rise of the Teals with the election of over 10 independents to the Australian Federal Parliament changed Australian politics. These are candidates who shared a commitment to climate change, integrity in politics and gender equality. Does their election mean we are witnessing the end of the two-party system? Will independents improve the quality of decision-making? Marian Wilkinson talks with Simon Holmes à Court, Margot Saville and Brook Turner about the Teals and their future.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Felicity Plunkett
Alison MacLeod’s historical novel Tenderness is a powerful recreation of the origins of D. H. Lawrence’s scandalous love story, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. From the author in exile, dying bereft in 1930s France, to the high drama of the obscenity trial, MacLeod’s novel captures the 20th century conflicts over censorship and sexuality. She talks about the power of literature to disturb, our urge to repress and the resonances of this historical chapter for our time.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Grant McAvaney
Publishing books on topical issues can be a health hazard, requiring deft footwork to avoid defamation suits, suppression orders, risk-averse publishers, cautious lawyers and, most particularly, litigious subjects. Veteran journalists and authors Louise Milligan and Adele Ferguson join with writer and lawyer Eve Thomson to revisit some of their most challenging projects.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Diana Reid
An acerbic wit and whip-smart observations are the hallmark of Sloane Crosley’s writing in her essays, columns and novels, drawing the praise of writers such as Nick Hornby and Elif Batuman. Her latest novel, Cult Classic, is a twisted mystery about metaphysics, modern love, memory and mind control. Crosley discusses her process and the connections between her fiction and non-fiction writing.
Supported by the Consulate of the United States.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Full title: "Yes, He Has Come to the End of His Sentence, But Does That Mean He Has Nothing More to Say?"
Chair: Sean O'Beirne
Irish novelist John Banville is the author of 26 books, including seven crime novels under the name Benjamin Black. In 2005, he won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. His latest novel, The Singularities, is a virtuosic, referential work in which he revisits some of his most celebrated characters and playfully grapples with the abiding literary problems of representation, invention and truth.
Event details: Wed 08 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
Chair: Gareth Evans
The personal and the political are intertwined in the memoir a Palestinian human rights lawyer writes about his father. This is a son’s story of a distant father forever enraged and galvanised by a litany of injustices - British colonial rule, the Nakba, Jordanian territorial ambitions and the many years of the Occupation. Aziz Shehadeh, an eminent jurist, was exiled, imprisoned and finally murdered by a collaborator. His son, Raja Shehadeh, shares his sorrow, his sense of alienation and his profound loss.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 3:45pm on the North Stage
Chair: Randa Abdel-Fattah
It is inevitable that First Nations and Palestinian writers would share a deep sense of displacement and the loss of homelands, language and heritage. How does the experience of stolen lands mark their writing? How does that loss express itself through the forms of poetry, fiction or nonfiction? Randa Abdel-Fattah explores these questions with Ramzy Baroud, Saree Makdisi and Amy McQuire.
Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage
Chair: Tom Wright
Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American writer, political activist and author. In her latest award-winning novel, Against the Loveless World, she chronicles the Palestinian struggle, the experience of statelessness and the spirit of resistance. Samah Sabawi is an award-winning playwright and activist whose work is a similarly powerful reckoning with a personal and political history of violent occupation, displacement and identity in the diaspora.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 1:15pm on the North Stage
Chair: Sara Saleh
Writing poetry in exile gives new meaning to what John Keats referred to as the poet’s “negative capability“ and their power to exist in uncertainties. How does one write from and about absence? Are the caesuras and repetitions of poetry uniquely suited to the subject of dispossession? Join Mohammed El-Kurd, Julia Cimafiejeva, Jeanine Leane and Hasib Hourani as they reflect on the power of poetry during uncertain times.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 12:00pm on the North Stage
Chair: Jumana Bayeh
Susan Abulhawa, Micaela Sahhar and Saree Makdisi together with Jumana Bayeh explore the power of literature to reimagine what has been distorted in the real world. Nowhere is this distortion more apparent than in relation to Palestine. Can literature reveal what has been suppressed to narrate the history of dispossession endured by generations of Palestinians? More radically, can literature envision and narrate an alternative world that does not yet exist?
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage
Chair: Catriona Menzies-Pike
It was Goethe who declared "call the dog, he is a reviewer". Reviewers are almost universally pilloried as partisan, ill-informed mediocrities fuelled by malice. What leads to this perception and why are they so reviled? We consider the state of Australia’s reviewing culture and the impact of backscratching and sycophancy on its present condition. The editor of the Sydney Review of Books, Catriona Menzies-Pike, is joined by Melinda Harvey, Jeanine Leane, Caroline Overington and Beejay Silcox.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Beejay Silcox
Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story is a paean to the solace of reading in times of grief and pain. Its starting point is her partner’s leukemia diagnosis and the challenge of preparing their children for an uncertain future. In conversation with writer and critic Beejay Silcox, Hooper examines the world of children’s literature – a genre that is remarkably dark – and explores how children understand and cope with a world they can’t control.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: John Carty
Writer and artist Kim Mahood describes her new book, Wandering with Intent, as “the writer equivalent of hunting and gathering… a product of wandering among the contradictions of the cross-cultural world I have chosen to inhabit.“ As Australia embarks on a discussion about enshrining an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution, Mahood invites us into a generous and open-hearted dialogue.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: Rick Morton
In an interview with The Guardian, author Craig Silvey admitted his favourite object is a mandolin – absolutely not to be confused with his passion for the ukulele – and expressed his regret over the lost breakthrough memoir he wrote at the age of 10. With Rick Morton, Silvey explains a writing career that includes a fascination with small Australian towns, the acts of courage that inspire him and why empathy matters.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sarah Kanowski
In an era of waning liberal utopianism, decreasing faith in the myth of economic progress and increasing social and psychological fragmentation, the epithet ’loser’ has acquired a newly powerful resonance. Josh Cohen discusses the experience of being a loser, its literary champions, from Thomas Bernhard to Franz Kafka, and the increasingly manic defences mobilised against this universal condition – from a swollen self-help industry to political demagoguery.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Rick Morton
Shannon Burns’ haunting memoir, Childhood, details the poverty, neglect and domestic dysfunction the author faced while growing up in suburban South Australia. Moving between first and third person perspectives, the memoir provides a window into the series of traumatic familial relationships that contributed to his turbulent childhood. Burns reflects on his experiences, what it means to ’make it out’ and the hope that can be found in literature.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
Chair: Monica Attard
Bill Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, has been the largest foreign investor in Russia since 2005. This has given him a unique insight into how Russia works. His conclusion in his new book, Freezing Order, is that Russia is riddled with corruption and human rights abuses and that its exercise of influence in elections overseas is deeply troubling. Browder explains why he has spent the last few years advocating for countries to adopt the Magnitsky Act.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Chair: Felicity Plunkett
In her 1970 book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett described Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a “quasi-religious tract" worshipping at the altar of the penis. Critical responses have since become more nuanced. Novelist Alison MacLeod and cultural critics Amit Chaudhuri, Geoff Dyer and Lara Feigel discuss a writer whose subject – sex and bodies – suddenly seems profoundly modern.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Bob Carr
The 20th century was deemed 'The American Century’. In more recent times, that title has been challenged by the might and power of China. Experts describe the new world order as multipolar. As America has turned inwards and its exceptionalism engendered skepticism, what are the ramifications? Is a world where spheres of influence are more balanced good for nation states, for their citizens and for collective international action? The Hon Bob Carr tests these propositions with Shalom Auslander, James Curran, John Keane and Fintan O’Toole.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: Katrina Strickland
Gender dynamics in the 21st century can be befuddling. Through fiction and non-fiction alike, three renowned authors explore the humour, pathos, heartbreak and the challenges of human connection in the modern city. Sloane Crosley, author of Cult Classic, Laura Kipnis, author of Love in the Time of Contagion, and Diana Reid, author of Seeing Other People, are keen observers of contemporary etiquette and the morality of modern personal relationships. They share their observations with Katrina Strickland.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Nicci Gerrard
Growing up Catholic on the outskirts of 1970s Belfast, Louise Kennedy’s earliest memories are marked by violence: flying glass lacerating her grandmother when a bomb went off during the Troubles. Her novel, Trespasses, is a love story set against a backdrop of escalating violence. It won the award for Novel of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards and has been hailed as a brilliant and devastating debut.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Paul Daley
Too young to shave and still wearing short pants, boys as young as 13 lined up and lied about their age to volunteer in the Second World War. These boys must have forgotten the horrors their fathers and grandfathers endured in the First World War or not understood their true impact. Paul Byrnes shares some of these tragic and deeply moving personal stories with Paul Daley, a journalist and author with an abiding interest in history and national identity.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Felicity Plunkett
British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage is also a playwright, a novelist, a screenwriter and a musician. While he has turned his hand to many art forms, he recognises the continued need for poetry: “It seems to me that, in this age of over-information, poetry is more important than ever, because it refuses to be garrulous and to join in with the constant diarrhoea of information. It is resolutely compact.“ Join us as Armitage looks back on his life and work.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Chair: Jon Faine
How should we judge Australia’s response to the pandemic? We were quick to declare a pandemic, to close our borders, to grow COVID in a lab. But we could also have done better – the pandemic divided the federation and our government failed to protect the elderly or the young. Our COVID report card is mixed. Join The Age’s Chief Political Reporter, Chip Le Grand, and renowned epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre for a fascinating conversation.
Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
Full title: State-Sponsored Greenwash: Offsetting Us Up to Fail
Chair: Paul Barclay
Brought to you by The Australia Institute in partnership with Adelaide Writers’ Week
While Australia has signed up to ’net zero emissions’ by 2050, governments and industry are still pursuing an agenda of fossil fuel expansion. Clever accounting, dodgy offsets and technocratic fantasies like carbon capture and storage continue to be used to conceal the fundamental contradiction between plans to increase gas and coal production and promises to tackle climate change. This session exposes Australia’s greenwash and regulatory capture – the critical first step to robust climate policy.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage
Full title: No Enemies, No Friends: Restoring Australia's Global Relevance
Chair: Paul Barclay
Brought to you by The Australia Institute in partnership with Adelaide Writers’ Week
How should Australia recalibrate its national security settings to deal with global disruption? Rather than lamenting why Australia has become so good at getting things so bad, how might we learn sure-footedness in our international affairs in a new and less predictable world?
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 1:15pm on the North Stage
Chair: Paul Barclay
Brought to you by The Australia Institute in partnership with Adelaide Writers’ Week
Democracy thrives on high expectations. The less faith people have in government, the more people shun the project of democracy. The idea that government spending, regulation and ownership can significantly improve the lives of most Australians is so derided it’s almost never seriously discussed. But during the pandemic, and now with wages, inflation and climate action, we see that’s exactly what Australians want: for the role of Government to go BIG.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 12:00pm on the North Stage
Chair: Paul Barclay
Brought to you by The Australia Institute in partnership with Adelaide Writers’ Week
Australia is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, at the wealthiest time in human history, so why do so many of us feel like we still can’t get ahead? Skyrocketing inflation and plummeting real wages have put households and hip pockets under serious pressure. In our modern, neoliberal economy, is this a bug or an intentional design feature? Australia’s leading thinkers in the industrial relations and workers’ rights space come together to discuss how we can make the future of life and work better for all Australians.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage
When the Fourth Estate is doing its job properly, it acts as a watchdog on the government of the day and is a guardian of the public interest. That’s why Insiders – the ABC’s flagship political discussion program – is vital viewing for citizens who care about the democratic process.
Join David Speers and a couch full of the country’s most astute analysts, including Laura Tingle, Jack Latimore and Samantha Maiden, to dissect the week in politics at this special live Insiders event. The Premier of South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, will be Speers’ special guest as the political interview of the week. Mike Bowers of Talking Pictures fame will be joined by one of our finest cartoonists to remind us why laughter is essential.
Join us for an evening of political analysis and insight.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 6:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: David Sly / 2023 MUD Literary Prize Winner: Tracey Lien
Inaugurated by the passionate readers who comprise Adelaide’s MUD Literary Club – the only philanthropic organisation in the country exclusively supporting literature – the MUD Literary Prize has established an impressive pedigree over its short life. Founded in 2018 to celebrate a debut novel of literary fiction, past winners are Sarah Schmidt (See What I Have Done), Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe), Sienna Brown (Master of My Fate), Pip Williams (The Dictionary of Lost Words) and in 2022, Diana Reid for Love and Virtue. Be the first to hear from the 2023 winner.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sarah Kanowski
Renowned British novelist Esther Freud is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, daughter of painter Lucien Freud and niece of British politician Clement Freud, but it was her mother who inspired her latest, captivating novel, I Couldn’t Love You More. Freud talks to Sarah Kanowski about the perils of family secrets, motherhood and love.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: Michaela Kalowski
Sally Hepworth is probably the only Australian author who has been featured on a billboard in New York’s Times Square. As a New York Times bestselling author whose domestic thrillers have been translated into 20 languages, she is one of Australia’s most successful exports. In conversation with Michaela Kalowski, Hepworth reflects on her eight novels, meeting comedian Amy Poehler and writing as an Australian for an international audience.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: Caroline Overington
At a certain point in our lives, we turn to thinking about ageing and its logical conclusion – death. What constitutes a good experience of growing older? The Hon Jill Hennessy, former Minister for Health and Attorney-General, and Nicci Gerrard, author of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love and the bestselling Nicci French books, share their reflections on what it means to die well.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Jack Latimore
Journalist Paul Daley has long been preoccupied by the myths of white Australia and the collective amnesia when it comes to our shameful national past. His latest novel, Jesustown, set in the mid-20th century in a remote Aboriginal community, is a study of the multi-generational effects of Australian colonial violence. He talks to Jack Latimore about why Jesustown had to be a novel and what fiction can contribute to truth.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Michaela Kalowski
Holly Ringland’s childhood was divided between a tropical garden in Australia and a campervan travelling through America’s national parks. The experience left her with a deep passion for the natural world that has wound its way through her writing and her work as co-host of ABC’s Back to Nature series. Ringland’s debut novel, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, is being made into a seven-part TV series for Amazon Prime and she recently published a second novel, The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
With Louise Adler & Amanda Vanstone. Claudia Roden was scheduled for livestream but was unable to stream in for the session. A conversation between Claudia and Amanda was later recorded and will be available soon.
More than 50 years ago, Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food introduced the flavours of the Middle East to western readers. Long before Ottolenghi, she introduced homecooks around the world to the delights of cumin and coriander from Egypt, sumac and tamarind from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranates from Iran and harissa from Africa. Claudia Roden CBE talks about flavours and cooking at home with the Hon Amanda Vanstone AO, owner of over 500 cookbooks and a whiz with braised duck and turnips.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Chair: Monica Attard
As the war in Ukraine drags on, cities are destroyed and people’s lives are devastated, how do we make sense of Russia and the rationale behind its ’special military operation’? There has been intense focus on the plight of Ukraine’s citizenry, but less attention has been paid to the Russian mindset, the historical context for this invasion and the likely consequences. Former ABC foreign correspondent Monica Attard is joined by political scientist Anatol Lieven, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick and Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Once upon a time the publishing mantra was that books about politics only sell if written by progressives. The past decade has proven that truism wrong. But what makes for a good book about contemporary politics? Is it scandal? Revelation? Good writing? Laura Tingle and John Warhurst (with Laurie Oakes) spent much of the past 12 months reading as judges of the inaugural Australian Political Book of the Year. So, what did they conclude?
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: Anne Summers
Hilary McPhee, together with her business partner Di Gribble, established Australia’s first woman-owned publishing house in 1975. For over two decades, McPhee discovered new writers who are now revered as greats of the Australian literary canon, including Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Drusilla Modjeska. Monkey Grip, Puberty Blues and Cloudstreet are just some of the books this Grand Dame of Australian letters nurtured into being. In this insightful conversation, McPhee talks about those halcyon days, her friend the late Carmen Callil and the state of modern publishing.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Jon Faine
“No matter what arguments I’d advance, I’d be the loser and murdered." The credo of Benzion Netanyahu in Joshua Cohen’s novel The Netanyahus encapsulates the cost of winning and of losing. Novelist Joshua Cohen and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen discuss the haunting figure of the loser in literature, politics and psychoanalysis.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Claire Nichols
James Joyce in Ulysses wrote: “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.“ John Boyne, Esther Freud and Louise Kennedy examine the Irish soul.
Supported by Culture Ireland.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Bob Carr
Sir David Hare, one of the greatest British playwrights of our time, explores his anxiety that our world has sped up and that history in this century is a dizzying, unpredictable and unsettling succession of events. Hare has always imbued the political with the personal, exposed the aphrodisiac of power and the creative energy of anger. His latest book, We Travelled: Essays and Poems, continues his life’s work of arguing against economic rationalism and the bankers, politicians, plutocrats and churchmen who profit from it.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Chair: Catriona Menzies-Pike
According to one critic: “Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary and on the west by tedium." Is there truth in this statement? Catriona Menzies-Pike chairs an expansive discussion with award-winning biographers Bernadette Brennan, Brigitta Olubas, Sean O’Beirne, Heather Clark and Samantha Rose Hill.
Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
Chair: Sarah Ayoub
In Runt, Craig Silvey has written a book for the whole family – and for all the dog lovers out there! A touching and heart-warming tale in the tradition of Charlotte’s Web and Babe, Silvey’s book centres on the relationship between a stray dog with a special talent and his adopted owner. In conversation with Sarah Ayoub, Silvey gives an insight into the impetus for this “hilarious tale of kindness, friendship, hurdles, hoops, tunnels, see-saws, being yourself and bringing out the best in others".
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 3:00pm in the Torres Tent
Chair: Clare Sawyer
Jared Thomas goes straight to the heart with his powerful new YA novel, My Spare Heart. The story centres on 17-year-old Phoebe, whose life is turned upside down when she relocates to the country with her dad, deepening the connection to her Indigenous culture. As she juggles the normal pressures of a busy teenage life, Phoebe must also navigate a tricky relationship with her unreliable mother. In this session, Thomas reflects on this uplifting story and the lessons to be found from his own life.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 2:00pm in the Torrens Tent
Chair: Clare Sawyer
Enter a world of adventure where the stakes are high and danger lies around every treacherous corner, a place where a mystery illness is making people speak ancient languages and bake old-fashioned cakes. This is the world of Trilby Moffat and it’s up to her to turn the tide, fighting time and an evil adversary with a bureaucratic bent. Thank goodness there’s cake! Join author Kate Temple as she reveals the secrets behind this dangerous world.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 1:00pm in the Torrens Tent
Chair: Clare Sawyer
Cop & Robber is the new nail-biter from Tristan Bancks, the bestselling author of Two Wolves, The Fall and Detention. Nash Hall’s dad is a criminal who just can’t seem to go straight. He wants Nash to help him commit a robbery. A big one. The trouble is, Nash’s mum is a cop. And the robbery is at Nash’s school. But Dad owes a lot of money to some very dangerous people and if Nash doesn’t help him do the job, it could cost both their lives. Meet author Tristan Bancks as he gives the lowdown on how he came up with this novel story idea.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12:00pm in the Torrens Tent
Chair: Clare Sawyer
Romance is a popular genre in Australian YA fiction, reflecting the age that the characters first begin to express their love and sexuality. There are added layers of complexity for characters from non-Western cultures, as they balance the usual growing pains of adolescence and young romance with a sense of being different from the dominant culture. Join authors Sarah Ayoub and Randa Abdel-Fattah as they discuss realistic characters, romantic tropes, feelings of being ’Other’ and the importance of self-love.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 11:00am in the Torrens Tent
Acclaimed author Sean Williams makes a stopover in his hometown of Adelaide between visits to Ireland and Antarctica to talk about his most recent books, Honour Among Ghosts and Her Perilous Mansion. How do all these things connect? Let two Shadow Judges from the Children’s Book Council of Australia (SA Branch), Lally E and Evie M, be your guides as we explore the remarkable mind behind these suspenseful middle-grade fantasies full of mystery, twists and skulduggery.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:00am in the Torrens Tent
Host: DEFNE / Poets include Isi Ferguson, Anna McGahan, Miles Merrill, Tracey O’Callaghan, Steven Oliver & Joanna Yang
Writers’ Week’s favourite showcase of slam poetry and spoken word returns in 2023 with performances from poets striding the local, national and international stages. Among those joining us on the North Stage are Steven Oliver, Isi Ferguson, 2022 Slam Champion Joanna Yang and runner-up Anna McGahan, as well SA Champ Tracey O’Callaghan and founder of Australian Poetry Slam Miles Merrill. Join us for two enthralling hours of exhilarating and inspiring poetry.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 3:45pm on the North Stage
Poets include: Natalie Harkin, Colin Kinchela, Tyberius Larking, Luke Patterson, Latoya Aroha Rule and Ellen van Neerven
Join Dominic Guerrera and Alison Whittaker as they share everything that queer and trans First Nations poetry has to offer. Local and interstate poets from the NANGAMAY dream MANA gather DJURALI grow anthology will perform and yarn over their explosive and nourishing work. Poets include: Natalie Harkin, Colin Kinchela, Tyberius Larking, Luke Patterson, Latoya Aroha Rule and Ellen van Neerven.
Presented by Writers SA in partnership with BLACKBOOKS and Australian Poetry.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage
Chair: Jill Jones
Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and translator now living in exile. Through poems that are intensely personal and political, she explores language and its limits. Cimafiejeva opens up about her childhood in a Chernobyl zone, her insistence on self-determination in a deeply authoritarian state and the despair and guilt she feels in fleeing.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12pm on the North Stage
Chair: Felicity Plunkett
A conversation with Sarah Holland-Batt – poet, critic, editor and advocate for aged care – about her new collection. The Jaguar is a tender and fierce confrontation of mortality and grief, framed by elegies for the poet’s father, and imbued with the lyricism, force and energy that typify the work of this extraordinary poet.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage
Chair: Richard Buckham
“The world likes to trace the author’s life in the novel but the obvious isn’t always true. Something that was very close to you and resembles your experience isn’t necessarily the deepest version of the story… One feels for another person. One observes. One imagines.“ Literary biography is either portrait or autopsy according to one of the masters of the genre, Dame Hermione Lee. In Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, Brigitta Olubas is both coroner and portraitist. Meet the biographer as she reflects on Hazzard’s own sense of her life’s work, which included four novels, two short story collections, a peripatetic life, great friendships with other writers and a long marriage to an aesthete 25 years her senior.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 9:30am on the North Stage
Chair: Laura Tingle
Have we learned nothing from the tragedies, the waste of human life and the devastation endured during the 20th century? Our collective history contains many painful chapters – the two world wars, Hiroshima and Vietnam, to name just a few. The atrocities of war have persisted in the 21st century, as we see in the destruction in Ukraine, the price of years of conflict in the Middle East and the rise of autocrats. Anatol Lieven, Fintan O’Toole and Ben Macintyre reflect on why the international community has failed to learn the lessons of history.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 5pm on the West Stage
Chair: Miriam Cosic
In an open letter to the people of Ukraine in 2022, novelist, journalist and playwright Alhierd Bacharevič wrote: “I am prepared to take upon myself the shame and disgrace of Belarus for what is happening – in exactly the same way as German writers in the emigration did in the times of the Second World War." Since then, his masterwork, Dogs of Europe, has been banned as ’extremist material’ and confiscated copies have been destroyed.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: Kim Mahood
Dean Ashenden’s book Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence combines memoir, history and journalism and has been awarded the inaugural Australian Political Book of the Year. Ashenden is joined by Peter Sutton for a conversation about “the sorry story of White Australia’s repeated assaults – and clumsy interventions – on Indigenous Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet".
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: Jonathan Green
Full session title: "We Gasp for Air Among People Who Believe They Are Absolutely Right"
Can democracy survive contempt? In their Quarterly Essay 87: Uncivil Wars, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens argue that mutual contempt and intractable political enmity undermine the condition of democratic culture and truly free speech. They talk with Tom Ballard, Tim Dunlop, Sumeyya Ilanbey and Bernard Keane about the forces that have shaped contemporary political life and the possibility of recovering meaningful public debate.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Glyn Davis
When asked about the impact and legacy of her work, Hannah Arendt responded: “If I may speak ironically, that’s a masculine question. Men always want to be influential... I want to understand.“ Samantha Rose Hill’s rich biographical study of Arendt is an attempt to understand one of the most renowned thinkers of the 20th century and her own relentless quest for understanding. In conversation with Professor Glyn Davis AC, renowned philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer will join Hill to consider Arendt’s “radical openness“ and influential oeuvre.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Lenore Taylor
Award-winning novelist Heather Rose’s memoir, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, has a title that certainly piques the reader’s interest, but the words between the covers reveal a deeply personal, confronting story quite different to what you might expect. The book contains meditations on grief, healing, love and creativity that follow the course of the author’s life. In conversation with Lenore Taylor, Editor of The Guardian Australia, Rose traces the threads that bind her childhood griefs to her adult writing life.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
Chair: Neil Armfield
Over his 40-year career in filmmaking, Terence Davies has explored the lives of some of the great writers of the 20th century – Edith Wharton, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Terence Rattigan and Siegfried Sassoon. It is the inner life at the domestic hearth that has been his preoccupation. No contemporary filmmaker has plumbed the nature of the literary life with greater respect for the text. He joins Neil Armfield AO, Australia’s pre-eminent director of theatre, film and opera, to explore how literature is transformed in other art forms.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Special guests: Shalom Auslander, Geoff Dyer, Louise Kennedy & Margot Saville
Join Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski from ABC Radio’s Conversations for a reading confessional. Whether it’s airport novels, fan fiction, fantasy or cookbooks, Fidler and Kanowski will encourage their panel of special guests - Shalom Auslander, Geoff Dyer, Louise Kennedy and Margot Saville - to confront the brutal reality that is their reading life.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Sarah Ferguson
When Sarah Ferguson was 14, she took out her most decorative stationery and wrote to Philip Larkin asking him why his poetry was so bleak. As host of ABC’s 7.30, Ferguson remains an avid poetry reader. She joins us for a celebration of Simon Armitage, the British Poet Laureate, alongside Shaun Micallef, Sarah Holland-Batt, Julia Cimafiejeva and Max Gillies.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: Sarah Hanson-Young
Cultural critic Laura Kipnis wants to know what a plague-inflected dystopia does to our ability to love one another. In Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, Kipnis’ reflection on her own relationship in lockdown is interwoven with broader questions about sexual politics, gender politics and biopolitics in a post-COVID world. Join us for this topical conversation.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Sophie McNeill
In 1937, 148 writers, including Samuel Beckett, Rebecca West and T.S. Eliot, answered the call to respond to the Spanish Civil War. Writers have continued to take positions in moments of crisis, including the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2003. Sophie McNeill talks about the role of politically engaged writers with Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ramzy Baroud, Peter Singer and Mohammed El-Kurd.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Michaela Kalowski
In 2022, Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. His very funny depiction of Benzion Netanyahu – a third rate academic attempting to secure a job in a third rate American university – is part black comedy, part history lesson and part reflection on Jewish-American identity. Cohen talks about what it means to write a ’true story’ and the relationship between fantasy, history and fiction.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Tony Jones
Ben Macintyre, the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, combines a literary gift for thrilling espionage writing with the rigour of a historian. His latest work, Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, explores the astonishing true story of prisoners inside an ’inescapable’ Nazi prison camp in the Second World War. Macintyre talks to Tony Jones about his oeuvre and what it means to write a nonfiction novel.
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Chair: Bob Carr
George Orwell said: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." The Public Square is a place we cherish in a democracy, so what is our response to ideas we might find upsetting, confronting, even provocative? Do we only converse with people who share our views? Or are we, as a civil society, able to listen to each other, reflect on the issue at hand and sometimes even change our deeply held beliefs? Joining the Hon Bob Carr for this important conversation are Shalom Auslander, Sarah Ferguson, David Hare and Mark Scott (via video).
Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
Held on Sat 04 Mar in the Torrens Tent, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held on Sat 04 Mar in the Torrens Tent, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held on Sat 04 Mar in the Torrens Tent, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held on Sat 04 Mar in the Torrens Tent, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held in the Torrens Tent on Sat 04 Mar, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held in the Torrens Tent on Sat 04 Mar, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Read by Max Gillies and Mem Fox
Held in the Torrens Tent on Sat 04 Mar, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held in the Torrens Tent on Sat 04 Mar, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Held in the Torrens Tent on Sat 04 Mar, Kids’ Day featured an all-Australian line-up of some of the brightest names in children’s literature.
Chair: Lenore Taylor
According to Armando Iannucci: “An infinite number of gag-writers, working all day in a gag factory, couldn’t come up with any of the perfectly-formed one-liners that populate Marina Hyde’s hilarious writing… But behind the wit lurks real anger, argument, exasperation and intelligence. Her writing is more than a gentle poke in the ribs: it’s a well-wrought and deftly aimed smash in the teeth." Journalist Marina Hyde joins Lenore Taylor to talk about her new book and take us on a wild ride, from David Cameron to Liz Truss, the dangerous idiocy of the Trump presidency and never-ending royal capers.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sue Turnbull
If murder, mean streets and psychopaths pique your interest, this is an unmissable conversation. Join four giants of crime writing – Dervla McTiernan, the writing duo Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, Chris Hammer and our foremost crime reviewer, Sue Turnbull, for an in-depth discussion of the genre. They’ll explore the possible end of the ’hardboiled dick’, the role of women as victims and sleuths, the rise of ’Aussie Noir’ and whether the Gone Girl publishing cliché has finally petered out.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage
Chair: Mireille Juchau
Gail Jones' and Shirley Hazzard’s hypnotic novels describe how moments of historical intensity can shift and slow time; both attend to how art can transfigure a life. In her brilliant biography, Brigitta Olubas surveys Hazzard’s life and work with a novelist’s eye for the private and intimate. Jones’ Salonika Burning is set in Greece where four historical figures undertake caring at the frontlines of war. What craft and style decisions establish these fraught encounters? Join highly acclaimed biographer Olubas and award-winning novelist Jones in conversation with Mireille Juchau.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage
Chair: Sean French
Shalom Auslander, author of the darkly funny Foreskin’s Lament: A Memoir and Hope: A Tragedy, turns his satiric gaze to contemporary identity politics, family relationships and cannibalism in his latest novel. The outrageous premise of Mother for Dinner serves as a clever device to interrogate these themes in sharp, entertaining and often grotesque ways. Auslander joins us to talk about tribalism, mother issues and the crippling weight of history.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage
Chair: Jim Middleton
The TV series Succession has been appointment viewing and frequent comparisons have been drawn between the fictional Roy media empire and the real Murdoch family. Paddy Manning’s new book, The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch, could well provide background material for a future season in which the ageing, tyrannical mogul finally ’pops his clogs’. With Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chaired the 2021 senate inquiry into media diversity, Manning will take us inside the global media empire that Lachlan Murdoch is likely to inherit.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage
Chair: Felicity Plunkett
Sylvia Plath is a literary icon – praised and vilified in equal measure by devotees and critics. In her afterlife, the ’crazed poetess’ has become a legend and an entire industry has flourished around her life, her work and her death. There have been biographies, hagiographies, critical studies, psychoanalytical reviews and novels dedicated to Plath. Heather Clark has written the definitive biography. She and Felicity Plunkett, poet and critic, share their reflections on this remarkable writer.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 10:45am on the West Stage
Chair: J.M. Coetzee
British psychoanalyst Dr Paul Williams has written extensively about the human mind, including a trilogy drawing on aspects of the author’s life over three stages – childhood, adolescence and adulthood. His latest book, The Authority of Tenderness: Dignity and the True Self in Psychoanalysis, is the final in the trilogy. In a conversation with Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee, Williams reflects on the adult’s task of recollecting, rewriting and reworking psychosis and trauma.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage
Chair: Jon Faine
After almost three decades on Australian screens, Shaun Micallef has become a cultural icon. From quiet beginnings in suburban Adelaide – an ideal place for a young boy to hone a gift for the surreal – to national stardom, his path has been an unexpected one. Micallef talks to Jon Faine about his successes, his failures, and his abiding love of comedy.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 5:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Richard Fidler
In The Passion of Private White, bestselling author Don Watson describes the fifty-year relationship between an isolated clan in northern Arnhem Land and Neville White, an anthropologist and Vietnam War veteran. It is a window into our history, as a complex set of contradictions, conflicts and degrees of recognition between coloniser and colonised unfold. Watson talks about this encounter between two worlds and the story of human adaptation, suffering and resilience evident in both.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage
Chair: David Nolan
Australians are now engaged in a national conversation about a change to the constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Nations of Australia and create a Voice to Parliament. It's been a struggle of decades - first in 1967, for the right be counted in the census, and now to be consulted about policies that impact First Nations people. In the lead up to the referendum, Natalie Ahmat, Jack Latimore and Jodan Perry, three of our leading Indigenous journalists, discuss the challenges in covering the Voice, meeting audience expectations and battling audience fatigue.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage
Chair: Steve Bracks
It is a truism that political memoirs are an invaluable first draft of history. Are political biographies equally unreliable and imprecise? Are living subjects more problematic than dead ones? Former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks explores the genre with some of Australia’s leading journalists – Sumeyya Ilanbey (biographer of Daniel Andrews), Chris Wallace and Margot Saville.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage
Chair: Maxine McKew
Fintan O’Toole is one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, as a columnist for The Irish Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Guardian and as the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. Through his writing, O’Toole has provided some of the sharpest critiques of post-Brexit Britain. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a brilliantly original account of the making of modern Ireland from the dead hand of the Catholic Church to the legalisation of gay marriage.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage
Chair: Nicole Abadee
In The Book of Roads & Kingdoms, Richard Fidler charts the story of the medieval travellers who journeyed to the edges of the known world during Islam’s Golden Age, travelling through China, India, Africa and Byzantium. In conversation with Nicole Abadee, he talks about the flourishing cultural life of Imperial Baghdad, the literary accounts of its wanderers and the devastating fall of this dazzling lost world.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage
Chair: Louise Adler / Translator: Elena Mikhailik
Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Laureate, has been credited with the invention of a new literary genre: a “novel of voices“, a documentary prose in which individuals record their own personal and political histories. If Alexievich is writing “a history of the soul“, it’s a soul that is forged in crisis – be it the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan or the collapse of the USSR. In 2018, she was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya Award from RAW in WAR, an organisation founded by human rights leader Mariana Katzarova. In this conversation, they discuss the imperative to document truth.
Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage
Chaired by Victoria Purman
CW: Discussion of abortion. A bestseller in Sue Orr’s New Zealand, Loop Tracks is complex, nuanced and compassionate. Written in real time against the progress of COVID, it opens in Auckland in 1978 as Charlie waits to board a flight to Australia to have an abortion, the sole NZ clinic recently closed. When the plane is delayed on the tarmac, she makes an impulsive choice, the consequences of which are profound. We learn of Charlie then, and in contemporary COVID NZ, where she lives with her grandson and the spectre of her troubled stranger of a son.
Chaired by Michael West
“Water policy is hard,” says Malcolm Turnbull, subject as it is to so many fiercely competing interests. Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells interviewed many of these interests for their book, Sold Down the River: How Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia’s Water Market. Opening the trade in water was supposed to make its allocation more efficient, but as the authors show, it has created a whole host of perverse outcomes. They demonstrate how we have failed to protect our most precious resource.
Chaired by Collette Snowden
The strong female protagonists in Jane Caro’s The Mother and Debra Oswald’s The Family Doctor take matters into their own hands. Debra’s Paula is a dedicated suburban GP, devastated by the murder of a friend and her children by their estranged husband and father. Jane’s Miriam is a successful businesswoman whose life is upended when her daughter’s marriage turns sour. These provocative, urgent novels brim with fury, grief and deep love as they explore what happens when you are tested to the limit, and ask when is it justified to fight fire with fire?
Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs
As we lurch from one scandal of misspent public money to the next, transparency and accountability in public life have never seemed rarer. Fiona McLeod is Chair of the Accountability Round Table. Her book, Easy Lies and Influence, documents how community interests have been undermined. Through his fiercely independent news site, Michael West is known for following the money, highlighting those corporations exercising insidious power over our democracy. They ask: where have we gone wrong and what should we do now?
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
The twins at the heart of Campbell Mattinson’s deeply moving We Were Not Men suffer great tragedy and risk losing themselves and their vital relationship in the aftermath. Hannah Bent’s wondrous When Things Are Alive They Hum is a celebration of life and the profound connection between sisters, in this case the ambitious professional Marlowe and the captivating Harper, who has Down Syndrome, and is one of the most magical characters of the year.
Chaired by Natasha Yacoub
2021 marked twenty years since Australia sent the Special Air Service to board MV Tampa to repel desperate refugees and a horrified Norwegian sea captain. Abbas Nazari (After the Tampa) was aboard, ended up in New Zealand and is now a Fulbright scholar. Jaivet Ealom (Escape from Manus) fled the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar only to languish in Australia’s notorious Manus Regional Processing Centre for years. He became the only person to escape. They talk about the real consequences of Australia’s dark actions.
Chaired by Peter Rose
The Education of Young Donald trilogy is Donald Horne’s autobiographies — The Education of Young Donald (1967), Confessions of a New Boy (1985) and Portrait of an Optimist (1988). They’re the story of an Australian prophet; his years away from home, the gallery of characters he meets on the journey, the “successes that were failures and failures that were successes”, and his unexpected emergence as a voice of the nation. Seventeen years after his passing, analysis of his legacy feels timely in a country still dumbly surfing on its luck.
Chaired by Peter Goldsworthy
WARNING: CONTAINS REFERENCES TO SUICIDE.
The Silence Between Us: A Mother and Daughter's Conversation Through Suicide and Into Life is raw, courageous and devastatingly honest. A double memoir of mother and daughter Cécile and Oceane, it looks back nearly twenty years on Oceane’s suicide attempt at the age of eighteen. Compiled from contemporaneous diaries, letters, hospital records and psychiatric reports, the immediacy of the writing highlights the pain and confusion of the time and makes for confronting, necessary reading. Former Australian of the Year Pat McGorry joins Cécile and Oceane as they bravely break open the silence around suicide
Chaired by Anthony Durkin
- Seven-year-old Maxie falls into a rain-filled trench and drowns. From this tragedy emerges one of the High Court’s most engrossing cases and a landmark decision on the impact and import of inner suffering. The judge was ‘Doc’ Evatt – quick-witted, humane, brusque but flawed, a man who could brilliantly seize the moment but, like the dead brilliant Maxie, arguably fell short of his potential. A story of politics, pride, love, and an Australia growing into its skin, The Brilliant Boy is a dexterously handled slice of history by one of our finest – Gideon Haigh.
Chaired by Anton Enus
After the runaway success of her first two novels, Adelaide’s own Hannah Kent returns with Devotion, a story of the 19th Century Lutherans who migrated from Prussia to South Australia via a dangerous sea voyage. There are many types of love empathetically drawn – mothers and daughters, sibling and friends – but at the heart of the novel is the love story between narrator Hanne and her friend Thea. Hanne can hear nature’s music, and in this lush lyrical book, it becomes the poignant score to her great, majestic love.
Co-presented with Melbourne Writers' Festival
With its descriptions of the sophisticated economic and socio-political livelihoods of many First Nations’ communities, Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 multi-award-winning Dark Emu called for a reconsideration of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia. Confronting criticism from some who reject its portrayal of Aboriginal agriculturalists, and following the COVID-cancellation of their anticipated Melbourne Writers’ Festival session, Bruce and eminent historian Tom Griffiths (The Art of Time Travel) come together to consider the productive conversation emerging around Australia’s understanding of Aboriginal histories, and discuss the best way to deepen our shared knowledge of our nation’s vital first stories.
Chaired by Caroline Baum
From The Heather Blazing to The Master, Colm Tóibín is acclaimed for his skill at entering the mind of the writer. In The Magician, he turns his perspicacious eye to Thomas Mann. Outwardly genteel, inwardly tormented, cautious yet impatient, suspicious of the powerful but welcomed in their homes, Colm's Mann is a writer who withdraws from a world losing its sanity but finds himself dragged back into the mess of the times. Desire, exile, family – the themes are ambitious, but in Colm's deft hands, a superbly crafted epic has emerged.
Chaired by Rick Sarre
This affirming book is less about death than how to counteract the fear of it and live a better life. Psychologists Rachel and Ross Menzies examine the many ways humans grapple with the dread of our demise, from the good, such as enduring art, to the bad, such as rampant consumerism and overpopulation. Insightful, illuminating and generous, Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Society gives us the tools to overcome the fear of our own mortality – death anxiety – to enjoy our life while we have it.
Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs
There is a price to be paid for convenience. The one-click wonder of Amazon comes at a cost. In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis sets out to explore what that cost is for the “America that fell in the company’s lengthening shadow”, namely the places where Amazon’s influence proved pernicious. Alec tells a chilling but utterly gripping dystopian tale of the pervasive destructive impact of Amazon on American life and many of its cities.
Chaired by Paul Barclay
Join Big Ideas’ Paul Barclay for a fascinating conversation from two sides of the educational fence with the same sense of schooling: a system that resembles an over-decorated Christmas tree. Professor Pasi Sahlberg, a leading Finnish researcher based at UNSW’s Gonski Institute, meets Gabbie Stroud, prominent recovering teacher, to discuss the way back to success for Australia’s students, schools and teachers, and the complex mess that currently stands in the way.
Chaired by Smriti Daniel
Anuk Arudpragasam’s first book, The Story of a Marriage, earned him comparisons to W. G. Sebald and Primo Levi. His second, A Passage North, earned him a Booker short-listing. In it, Anuk explores the emotional scars from an individual’s lost love and a nation’s devastating civil war. Beginning with Krishan learning of the death of his ailing grandmother’s former caretaker, and ending, two days later, with him watching her body burn on her funeral pyre, his journey in between is a profound meditation on suffering and on the divided nation of Sri Lanka itself.
Chaired by Yves Rees
CW: Discussion of rape, assault. When Kathryn Heyman was 20, she was raped by a taxi driver on her way home from a party. He was found not guilty on account of Kathryn’s alcohol consumption and choice of underwear. “So if he is not guilty? What then? What am I? Did I have to be an innocent to be innocent?” asks Kathryn. This scorching memoir blazes with an eloquent rage, but also hope and transcendence, as Kathryn rewrites the ending to become the heroine in her own grand adventure on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.
Chaired by Sally Warhaft
Wildly ambitious in scope and ideas, Scott Ludlam’s Full Circle seeks nothing less than a new form of ecological politics. At once an analysis of the art and science of social movements and an urgent call to arms, Full Circle takes us deep into history with a poetic reimagining of the birth of the world. Spanning the contemporary globe, Scott connects with activists from fifteen nations, building solidarity and a shared understanding of how to confront the challenges that unite us.
Chaired by Paul Barclay
After consistent reform at a Federal level across the Hawke, Keating, Howard and Gillard Governments, policy ambition seems to have stalled. In his book A Decade of Drift, Martin Parkinson recounts serving six prime ministers as an integral part of key policy development at the highest levels. As CEO of the Grattan Institute for eleven years, John Daley has published widely across key policy areas, his writings underpinned by themes of prioritising government initiatives and the limits to government effectiveness. They argue Australia should demand more courage and commitment from their political leaders.
Chaired by David Marr.
CW: Discussion of homophobia, assault. It’s fifty years since the infamous drowning of law academic Dr Duncan in the River Torrens, a crime and outrage that provoked horror in the community and pioneering gay law reform. As the Adelaide Festival premieres a new oratorio about the still unsolved case, Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, award-winning author and acknowledged authority on the subject Tim Reeves publishes the definitive account of the devastating case that rocked the state and changed the nation.
Chaired by Karen Wyld
The road to spiritual redemption in the ashrams of India is much trod by Westerners. It rarely ends well. Miles Allinson’s much anticipated follow-up to his award-winning Fever of Animals, In Moonland, spans three generations as a son tries to uncover the truth behind his father’s apparent suicide. His investigations lead him to the ashram
of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In Liam Pieper’s Sweetness and Light, an American woman seeks enlightenment at a cultish ashram but is brought undone when she meets a shyster Australian.
Chaired by Michael Williams
Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr’s best-selling All the Light We Cannot See was particularly popular in Australia. His new book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, described by The Guardian as a “lungful of fresh air”, crystallises around an imagined novel written by historical author Diogenes for his recuperating niece. A fabulous adventure story, the book becomes the common thread throughout Anthony’s magical novel, with all its subsequent characters connected to this book within a book, whether as champion, custodian or threat. A joyous epic story of survival and love.
Hosted by Jessica Alice & Vincent Ciccarello.
Join the Arts Industry Council of South Australia (AICSA) and the Shadow Minister for Arts, Katrine Hildyard MP, for an inside look into SA Labor's approach to supporting a flourishing arts and culture ecology in South Australia ahead of the state election.
Hosted by the AICSA Chair and Director of Writers SA, Jessica Alice, and the AICSA Treasurer and Director of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Vincent Ciccarello, this is a companion event to the AICSA Election Series in-conversation with Premier Steven Marshall MP on Mon 7 Mar.
AICSA encourages parties and political candidates to put forward policies and commitments that support the long-term sustainability of arts practice and that improve the training, working, and living conditions of artists, as the arts and cultural sector look to recover from the devastating impact of the pandemic.
Experiencing art and culture in South Australia’s famous festival season, as well as throughout the year and in our everyday lives, is a central part of living in South Australia. For art and culture to thrive, the ecology of artists and makers, producers and presenters, independent practice through to our large public institutions and festivals, need to be resourced and celebrated.
Chaired by Jo Dyer
CW: Discussion of child sexual abuse, rape, sexual assault. 2021 was a year of reckoning. When Grace Tame accepted the Australian of the Year Award in January 2021, she exhorted survivors of sexual violence, long silenced by shame and law, to use their voices and “make some noise”. They’ve been doing just that ever since. Grace and Jess Hill, author of Quarterly Essay 84: The Reckoning: How #MeToo is Changing Australia, discuss the dramatic events of the last fifteen months, their impact on contemporary politics, and how the fight for women’s justice has reshaped the nation.
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
The genesis of Trent Dalton’s Love Stories was a blue Olivetti typewriter and a street corner in the Brisbane CBD. After inheriting the typewriter from the mother of a friend, Trent took to the streets and solicited real stories from passers-by: “Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?” The result is a warm, poignant, funny and deeply humane book that weaves the many stories that were shared about love in all its guises with generous memories of Trent’s own special moments.
Chaired by David Sly
When his debut crime novel, The Nowhere Child, became a runaway blockbuster, Christian White’s life was transformed. More success followed with another bestseller, a feature film and a Netflix TV series. His latest book is Wild Place, set in the Australian bayside suburbia of 1989 when a teenager goes missing. J.P. Pomare is following in Christian’s footsteps, with his literary thrillers winning awards and legions of fans, and being optioned for screen adaptation. His most recent novel is The Last Guests, a page-turning tale of suspense exploring ideas of surveillance and voyeurism.
Chaired by Anton Enus
Australia’s foremost researcher on modern Russia, Sheila Fitzpatrick, joins us at the pivotal moment in Russian history to discuss the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and Russia’s post-Soviet agenda under Vladimir Putin. Sheila’s recent book, The Shortest History of the Soviet Union, is a lively, authoritative distillation of seventy-five years of communist rule and the collapse of an empire, and an examination of Russia’s ongoing influence on global politics under its current president.
Chaired by Kerryn Goldsworthy
“Is it true the world’s going to die soon?” the young daughter of Walkley Award-winning writer Delia Falconer asks her. Delia struggles for an answer. This exquisite series of essays from one of our finest writers contemplates the way climate change is impacting not just our natural environment but our culture. They movingly capture a natural world infused with a deep sense of loss, and intimations of doom, along with Delia’s profound sadness at the damage we have wrought on our wounded world.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham
To celebrate the new edition of her classic texts, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, Polly Samson (A Theatre for Dreamers) and Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni (Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964) discuss the life and literary legacy of Charmian Clift. Glorious accounts of the bohemian life Charmian, husband George Johnston and their family led in Greece, these two books encapsulate the vivid, passionate and outrageously talented woman who was years ahead of her time.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin.
Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl was one of the buzziest books of 2021. When new employee Hazel-May joins Wagner Books, editorial assistant Nella is thrilled she’ll have a Black ally. But she soon finds herself eclipsed by the charismatic newcomer, and when she starts receiving anonymous notes entreating her to leave Wagner, things take a sinister turn. Part office satire, part thriller with a twist, this audacious debut is hilarious, unsettling and a compulsive read.
Chaired by Natalie Harkin.
Two of Australia’s most exciting young poets come together on one dynamic panel. Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear is a razor-sharp gothic reclamation that peels back the layers of colonialism and what we call Australia. It is both a radical act of literary agency and a celebration of and tribute to Country. Jazz Money’s how to make a basket is a fierce lyrical protest against settler violence and an ode to Queer and First Nations love. Their poetry sings, crackles and inspires.
Chaired by Paul Barclay.
The title of Robin DiAngelo’s last international bestseller entered the lexicon: White Fragility, describing the defensive response from White people when called out for things they have said or done that have caused unintended racial hurt or offence. In Nice Racism, Robin draws on her background as a sociologist and an educator to explain how well-intentioned White progressives can cause racial harm, whether by romanticising People of Colour or expecting them to educate. An important if uncomfortable discussion on how to be a true ally.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is an important voice in contemporary Australian literature and one of the few that heralds from Western Sydney. His first novel, The Lebs, was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Award and kicked off the autobiographical House of Adam trilogy. These books speak on growing up Lebanese Muslim in one of Australia’s most ethnically and culturally diverse regions and in an increasingly hostile post-9/11 landscape. The trilogy concludes with his most recent novel, The Other Half of You, a moving love letter written to the narrator’s young son.
Chaired by Caroline Baum.
Bernadette Brennan and Joyce Morgan wrote their excellent biographies in the hope their readers would become readers of their subjects. Bernadette’s Leaping Through Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears documents Mears’s rich, blazing life, revealing a writer of astonishing gifts and great fearlessness. Joyce’s The Countess from Kirribilli is the remarkable story of Elizabeth von Arnim, born Mary Beauchamp in Kirribilli, a prolific writer who became the toast of London, a literary sensation compared to Jane Austen. Both deserve celebration.
Chaired by Ben Brooker.
Following his New York Times bestselling How to Change Your Mind on the therapeutic value of psychedelics, Michael Pollan’s new book is This is Your Mind on Plants, a radical challenge to how we think about plants. Exploring the powerful attraction we have to psychoactive plants, Michael asks why they are subject to such paranoid and arbitrary regulation, and in wildly differing ways. Examining opium, mescaline and caffeine, he posits “societies condone the mindchanging plants that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.”
Chaired by Jo Case.
Alice Pung and Allee Richards’ protagonists each find themselves unexpectedly confronting motherhood. In Alice’s One Hundred Days, Karuna is just 16 when she falls pregnant and hostage to her Filipina Chinese mother’s controlling behaviour and general meanness, even as Grand Mar’s resilience saves them. Allee’s Eva sees her hopes for a new relationship with Pat dashed when he dies by suicide, never knowing she was carrying his child. The pregnancy becomes a catalyst for Eva to transform her life. Both books are characterised by depth and hope.
Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Twilight Talk | Authorial Voice
Hosted by Michael Williams.
Join us for our second Twilight Talk as we take on the big question of change and how to achieve it. Each of our panellists works tirelessly and effectively as an agent of change and a powerful advocate for their ideas and communities. Scott Ludlam is an activist, writer and former Deputy Leader of the Greens. Michael Mohammed Ahmad is a celebrated author and founder of the Sweatshop Literacy Movement that promotes writers and literature in and from Western Sydney. Joelle Taylor is a poet, social activist and fierce advocate for vulnerable and marginalised communities.
Chaired by Clare Wright
Described by The New York Times as “quietly dazzling”, Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex. “A truly inclusionary politics,” Amia writes, “is an uncomfortable, unsafe politics.” Moving beyond questions of consent, and the notion of wanted or unwanted sex, this formidable collection re-centres the second-wave feminist idea of the personal as political in thrilling new ways, asking us to interrogate what it is that shapes our expectations and desires.
Chaired by Angela Savage
For over fifty years, Tom Keneally has been writing about everything that makes us tick – and the contentious, disputed land that is ‘Australia’. In his new collection of thought-pieces, he moves seamlessly between deep questions of our past and moments of private revelation. A Bloody Good Rant is exactly what it says it is – a bit of ratbaggery, some judicious hindsight, and a generous serve of wisdom. The author of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schindler’s Ark and Corporal Hitler’s Pistol gets a few things off his chest.
Poetry in Performance with Elyas Alavi, Ken Bolton, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jelena, Dinic, Juan Garrido-Salgado, Dominic Guerrera, Jill Jones, Camille Roulière and Ruhi Yaganagi.
Alice Walker has described poetry as "a ruthless muse". Join some of the finest and most devoted local poets for an enthralling afternoon performance of verse, featuring Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jelena Dinic, Jill Jones, Juan Garrido-Salgado, Elyas Alavi, the prolific Ken Bolton, Camille Roulière, Ruhi Yaganagi, and Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna poet Dominic Guerrera.
Hosted by Jessica Alice, poet and Director of Writers SA. Co-presented with Writers SA.
Chaired by Tali Lavi.
Kurnai woman Veronica Gorrie grew up with a fear of the police. So she joined the force. In the first half of her powerful memoir, Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience, Ronnie describes a childhood full of both love and trauma. Her time as a police officer is detailed in its second half. Ronnie’s accounts of being Black and Blue are told with power and humour and provide harrowing but important insight into the rampant racism in our community and our police.
Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Chaired by Jane Howard.
“Deaf people feel and see sound: the entire body becomes a receptor,” writes Fiona Murphy in The Shape of Sound. She kept her deafness secret for twenty-five years. Blending memoir with observations about the healthcare industry, this beautifully crafted and powerfully written debut draws readers into a new sensory world, examining the stigma associated with disability while challenging assumptions about what it means to be deaf, and what it takes to truly communicate.
A transcription of this session will be available shortly.
Chaired by Kerry O’Brien
As our Foreign Minister from 1988 – 1996 and President of the Brusselsbased International Crisis Group thereafter, Gareth Evans is uniquely qualified to discuss the importance of good international citizenship in our interconnected world. Outlining four key tenets to assess a country’s record – foreign aid generosity, reaction to conflicts and their consequences, response to human rights violations, and contribution to global crises – he finds Australia wanting on all of them. His essay is a call for change and decency in the way we engage with the world.
Chaired by Michael Williams
In Christos Tsiolkas’s first foray into autofiction, 7½, his protagonist Christos declares he is tired of the lofty ambitions many novelists hold for their writing on politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality or the future. “All of them now bore me,” he declares. Instead, he will write about beauty. His powerful memories of the past, the strange present in which he tries to write – surrounded by the magnificently evoked natural world – and the novel on which he embarks are masterfully woven together into one compelling whole.
Chaired by Natasha Mitchell
Two brilliant books concerned with the morality intrinsic to energy policy. In Long Half-Life, Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society Ian Lowe demolishes nuclear energy, arguing it is indivisible from the industry’s role in weaponry, and that the issue of waste has never been solved. Political philosopher Jeremy Moss’s Carbon Justice posits we have a responsibility to recognise and combat the moral harm done by the mining and exporting of our fossil fuels. Far from being a minor contributor to climate change, he contends, our massive exports of fossil fuels make us one of its key drivers.
Chaired by Smriti Daniel
“Despite our best efforts,” writes Lucia Osborne-Crowley, “the body finds a way to express what the mind cannot.” The author of I Choose Elena returns with My Body Keeps Your Secrets in which she interviews other women and non-binary people from diverse backgrounds about the impacts of their respective traumas on their bodies, interweaving the results with rigorous research and her own story. She explores the weight of shame and the process of reclaiming a whole self in this deeply empathetic and intelligent book.
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
Following heartbreak, self-absorbed young Melbourne boy Will flees to New York in search of adventure and forgetting. When wild hedonism doesn’t help, and with his visa and money fast running out, Will finds himself in Littleproud, Ohio, working for Wayne Gage, Vietnam veteran, amateur shaman and collector of exotic animals. Emily Bitto’s follow up to her Stella Award-winning The Strays is a clever, complex tale, full of opulent writing and meditations on human nature and our relationship with the natural world.
Chaired by Lur Alghurabi.
The first time Amani’s father hit her mother, his wife of twenty-eight years, was the day he killed her. Amani brings a lawyer’s mind and a daughter’s heart to her devastating memoir, The Mother Wound, a book full of raging anger and the deepest of sorrow. In it, she seeks to come to terms with loss and grief, recounting her painful journey through the justice system and her quest for truth, accountability and, ultimately, healing and hope. It is a poetic, moving and powerfully inspiring debut.
Chaired by Tory Shepherd.
ABC journalist Paul Kennedy and former Sydney Swans player Brandon Jack were forced to challenge and transcend their own expectations, and that of those around them, before they could fi nd and embrace their life’s true calling. In Funkytown, Paul focuses on a critical year of his adolescence that became a turning point. 28 is the number of games Brandon played for the Swans and details the pressure and challenge of failing to succeed. Both are evocative accounts of sport, masculinity and breaking free.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson.
Omar Sakr is an acclaimed Arab-Australian poet and author. His most recent collection, The Lost Arabs, won the 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. His debut novel is Son of Sin (2022), a searing look at the impact of violence and repressed desires on a queer Arab Muslim man's life in Western Sydney.
With Thomas Keneally, Hannah Kent and Christos Tsiolkas. Chaired by David Sly.
Established by passionate readers to support the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week, the MUD Literary Club celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2022. As the only philanthropic organisation in the country exclusively dedicated to supporting literature, MUD is a unique and proudly Adelaide institution that has supported Australian authors since its inception. A powerhouse panel of “MUD Mates” Thomas Keneally, Hannah Kent and Christos Tsiolkas discuss the role of literature in contemporary culture and MUD in Australia and we learn the winner of the 2022 MUD Literary Prize.
Chaired by Kerry O'Brien.
Two deep thinkers and fine writers turn their minds to contemporary Australia. In Lies, Damned Lies: A Personal Exploration of the Impact of Colonisation, Claire G. Coleman gives us insight into the stark reality of the ongoing trauma of Australia’s violent colonisation. Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia: A Search for the Soul of the Nation interrogates what defines us as a country. It tracks the contest between an imaginative and defensive country, and what we must do to become our best selves.
Chaired by Angela Savage.
Turning the crime genre on its head, Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name and Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Newcomer both centre the victim in their stories of violent death and the investigations that follow. The haunting, strangely joyous Before You Knew My Name tells of Alice Lee arriving in New York with just a camera and hope, destined to be a Jane Doe one month later. The Newcomer, which fictionalises an infamous 2002 murder on Norfolk Island, is a smart, provocative portrait of prejudice, violence and grief.
Chaired by Jennifer Mills.
In this remarkable memoir, historian and author Yves Rees invites readers into their experience of coming out as trans. At once generous and challenging, All About Yves is a fascinating journey through the author’s experience of ‘re-becoming’: “What happens when, aged 30, you understand you’re transgender?” they ask. Situating their personal story within the broader historical and cultural context of transgender people in Australia and around the world, Yves provides a warm and illuminating perspective on complex issues of identity, sexuality and the human experience.
Chaired by Andrew Fowler
Australia's recent treatment of high-profile whistleblowers has been shockingly punitive. Three lawyers speak from intimate experience. Bernard Collaery has faced an ongoing four-year ordeal for representing Witness K, a former ASIS officer who alleged the Commonwealth illegally spied on impoverished neighbour Timor Leste for private commercial gain. David McBride faces life in prison after the Government elected to pursue charges against him for revealing the allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan that led to the Brereton Report. Jennifer Robinson represents Wikileaks founder and abandoned Australian citizen Julian Assange.
Chaired by Kerryn Goldsworthy
In her latest book, The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life, Charlotte Wood shares the insights into creativity she has gained over her long career in literature, paying close attention to her own mind, to the world around her and to the way she and others work. Her message is powerful: “A rich inner life is not just the preserve of the arts. The joys, fears and profound self-discoveries of creativity … I believe to be the birthright of every person on this earth.”
Chaired by Louise Milligan
Events of the last year have brought a renewed and urgent focus on the experiences of women seeking redress after experiencing harassment or assault. With exhausting regularity, the perpetrator is protected at the expense of the victim, with the justice system and corporate culture accused of exacerbating trauma. In their books System Failure and Power and Consent, Michael Bradley and Rachel Doyle draw on their legal experience to highlight the flaws in our current laws. Advocate and survivor Saxon Mullins was instrumental in changing the definition of consent in NSW.
Chaired by Anton Enus
In 2008, Black Inc published Growing Up Asian in Australia, a collection of stories from Asian Australians about what it was like to grow up as an outsider in your own country. The Growing Up series has been entertaining, informing and inspiring readers across the country ever since. To celebrate the release of a compilation anthology, the editors of the Queer and Aboriginal editions, and a contributor to the Disabled edition, come together to celebrate the diversity of our nation, captured so movingly and delightfully in this important series.
Chaired by Natasha Mitchell
As we stand at a crossroads crowded with interconnected issues for our planet’s future – climate change, energy, soil, water, natural disasters – farming sits at the heart of them all. In Why You Should Give a Fck About Farming, Gabrielle Chan lays out how our nation, its leaders and eaters must find new ways to work and live on our precious land. Anika Molesworth’s Our Sunburnt Country* charts a way forward for practical and sustainable farming – if only we find the courage to take it.
Hosted by Yves Rees & Clare Wright with guests John Carty & Jared Thomas.
In a special live recording of the peak-nerd podcast Archive Fever, historians Clare Wright and Yves Rees dig into settler colonial record-keeping with guests Professor John Carty and Dr Jared Thomas from the South Australian Museum. Launching the fourth season of the popular history podcast, the duo ask how the Museum is grappling with its collection of unidentified Indigenous remains, and explore how its historical artefacts can operate as a cultural seedbank to help Aboriginal people remember and reconnect with Indigenous knowledges.
Performed by Peter Carroll / Introduced by Peter Goldsworthy
The late Les Murray was our unofficial poet laureate – irascible, generous, thoughtful, refractory. His poetry was so influential it rewrote our vernacular. He moves us as he is effortlessly profound. In this special event, veteran of the Australian stage Peter Carroll performs a broad survey of Les’s verse, from his early work in the Sydney years to selections from the newly released posthumous Continuous Creation. Joseph Brodsky described Les as “quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.” In this presentation by another of our national treasures, the language lives on.
Chaired by Tali Lavi.
Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch is one of the wildest debuts of the year, a feral, often hilarious take on the impact of new motherhood, as a resentful, flailing woman finds herself transforming into a dog. The monstrousness of mothers takes a more sombre form in Briohny Doyle’s Echolalia, in which a young mother’s alienation from her family and the shrinking world she inhabits lead to a psychological disintegration that matches that of the scorching world outside.
Chaired by Tom Wright.
John Bell and Jonathan Biggins have spent their lives on the stage. John is our foremost interpreter of Shakespeare. He documents lessons from Shakespeare’s plays in Some Achieve Greatness: Lessons on Leadership and Character from Shakespeare and One of His Greatest Admirers. Jonathan is best known as a leading political satirist and was recently acclaimed for his embodiment of our 24th Prime Minister in his one man show, The Gospel According to Paul, recently adapted into a book. They discuss their lives in the theatre, the essence of leadership and the power of imagination.
In conversation with Melissa Roberts.
When correspondents Bill Birtles and Michael Smith abruptly left China in September 2020 after late night visits from China’s notorious secret police, it marked the first time in decades that Australia had no journalists on the ground. Bill went on to write The Truth About China: Propaganda, Patriotism and the Search for Truth. He joins Trevor Watson, the co-editor of The Beijing Bureau, a collection of essays from some of Australia’s leading correspondents based in China from 1970 to the near present, and Hong Kong-based China correspondent Sue-Lin Wong, to discuss their experiences and insights, in a conversation led by Melissa Roberts, co-editor of The Beijing Bureau.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin.
David Brophy’s China Panic: Australia’s Alternative to Panic and Pandering is a nuanced and insightful analysis of the deterioration of Australia’s relationship with China. As fearmongering about China builds in the lead up to the Federal election, David Brophy and Jason Yat-Sen Li discuss the changing state of our region and the implications for our foreign policy, including the weakening American hegemony in Asia and the worsening levels of state repression in China.
Twilight Talks | Authorial Voice
Hosted by Benjamin Law.
Join Australia’s favourite raconteur Ben Law for our rescheduled Twilight Talks, now on the Plane Tree Stage at 5pm. Living Gender brings together a dynamic panel to examine gender in contemporary Australia, featuring Yves Rees, whose memoir All About Yves: Notes from a Transition is a beautiful account of re-becoming and trans identity, Omar Sakr, a lauded Queer poet and novelist, whose thrilling writing examines notions of belonging when one’s identity is at odds with one’s family and faith, and Brandon Jack, a former AFL player who suffered greatly when he tried to conform to sport’s rigid notions of masculinity, and was liberated when he reimagined what it meant to be a man.
Chaired by Jacqueline Lo.
One of Australia’s foremost sinologists distils the sprawling history of China into a pacey, readable account of its origins, impact and influence. Named as one of the top five books on China of 2021, Linda Jaivin’s The Shortest History of China explores everything from China’s philosophical genesis to its contemporary political system. Richly informative and highly entertaining, this compact survey is the perfect introduction to China in all its complexity.
Poetry in Performance.
Geoff Goodfellow returns to Writers’ Week with a reading of his new verse novella, Blight Street, featuring Geoff and performers Roslyn Oades and Nic Darrigo.
Set in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, Blight Street is written in the language and idiom of the culture it portrays. Harrowing but tender, Blight Street draws on the vital themes that characterise Geoff’s writing: the working class struggle, the tragedy of addiction and the celebration of love.
The reading is followed by a short interview with Geoff, chaired by Rick Sarre.
Chaired by Benjamin Law.
In his detailed account of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong, long-term Hong Kong resident, journalist and lawyer Antony Dapiran reports on the 2019 anti-government protests from the inside. “It is a battle for Hong Kong’s very soul,” he writes. Providing important context dating back to the British Handover in 1997, Antony contemplates both the big and small events that led to the tipping point of 2019, and invites the question, what will happen next?
Chaired by Linda Jaivin
“What is so good about Dickens’ novels?” asks John Mullan – and then proceeds to answer in thirteen essays of exquisite prose. From Dickens’ evocation of the senses, particularly taste and smell, to his inventiveness with names; from the melodrama of Little Dorrit to the high-mindedness of Hard Times, Mullan’s Dickens emerges as a shapeshifter and conjuror extraordinaire. Whether you know your Twist from your Copperfield, or you’re a complete Dickens newbie, The Artful Dickens is a riveting read and brings a welcome focus to one of the English language’s greatest minds.
Chaired by Jennifer Mills
A welcome discovery for many at the 2019 Adelaide Writers’ Week, British powerhouse poet and performer Joelle Taylor returns with her new collection C+NTO and Othered Poems. The winner of the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, this visceral and emotional collection was named by New Statesman as the poetry book of 2021 and described as “one of the most astonishing and original poetry collections of recent years”. Simultaneously intimate and epic, its riveting exploration of gender confirms Joelle as one of the key chroniclers of her community and times.
Chaired by Meredith Lake
Little more than 100 years old, Pentecostalism currently has 600 million followers worldwide and is on track to have 1 in 10 people pledging allegiance by 2050. Reporting this revolution from twelve countries – including Australia - Elle Hardy’s Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking Over the World weaves a timeless tale of miracles, money and power, set in our volatile age of extremes. Equal parts troubling and entertaining, Beyond Belief exposes the Pentecostal agenda: not just saving souls, but transforming societies and controlling politics… and they have the cash and influence to succeed.
Chaired by Sharon Davis
On 19 November, 2020, the Chief of the Australian Defence Force stood in front of our nation and apologised to another: “To the people of Afghanistan,” said Angus Campbell, “on behalf of the Australian Defence Force, I sincerely and unreservedly apologise for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers.” He spoke on the release of the findings of the Brereton Inquiry into War Crimes. Samantha Crompvoets’s work triggered that report and is outlined in Blood Lust, Trust & Blame. Mark Willacy reported first on the crimes it investigated, detailed in Rogue Forces.
Chaired by Rick Sarre
Two of Australia’s most distinguished thinkers join forces in this unmissable conversation. With combined life experience of more years than it’s polite to mention, Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty’s An Insider’s Plague Year and dazzling polymath Barry Jones’s What Is To Be Done? continue their authors’ lifelong commitment to better the world as they reflect on the pivotal role of science, the failure of our politics, and what we must do to confront the great challenges of our time.
Chaired by Sally Warhaft
NSW Treasurer Matt Keane describes Australian and Biden climate and energy adviser Saul Griffith as having “a brain the size of a planet. He’s a genius”. In The Big Switch, Saul lays out a detailed blueprint for fighting climate change while creating millions of new jobs and a healthier environment. While billionaires might plot to escape the planet they’ve trashed via a private rocket to Mars, Saul says, the rest of us will stay and fight for the future. The Big Switch tells us how we can win.
Chaired by Kerry O'Brien
Richard Flanagan returns to Writers’ Week for a wide-ranging discussion with Kerry O’Brien. Drawing on his journalism of recent years, particularly his now iconic essay The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-freedom and his recent bestseller on the salmon industry, Toxic, Richard and Kerry discuss the conformity that blights our national life, along with ideas of freedom, leadership, and the roots of inequality. If we are to find hope, Richard says, we must finally take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful.
Chaired by Nick Ryan
Following the shocking news of Shane Warne’s untimely death overnight on Friday, a session to remember Shane's oversized talent, personality and legacy to cricket. Cricbuzz’s Bharat Sundaresan and Sydney Morning Herald’s Malcolm Knox sit down with Nick Ryan to remember the man described as the greatest leg spinner the world has ever known and the immense contribution he made to the game.
Chaired by Cath Kenneally.
Holly lives a simple life in America when a Facebook message from across the seas and decades brings her past hurtling back, a past of trauma, abuse and terrible sadness. As she slowly excavates her life, as Holly, as Jo, as Maggie, we explore the courage and desperation it takes to reinvent a life once, twice, thrice. A book of great empathy, heartbreak and devastating beauty, Jennifer Down's Bodies of Light asks how much trauma a person can bear, and how one can find a way to live with it.
Chaired by Tom Wright.
AFL is one of Australia’s most popular sports and the only one we can claim as indigenous. According to The Boys’ Club, a jaw-dropping account of the scandals that have beset the AFL over the last twenty years, it is also managed by a ruthlessly entitled Melbourne-based executive that operates with a stunning lack of transparency and accountability. Michael Warner takes us behind the scenes and into the inner workings of the AFL to reveal how it became one of the richest and most powerful organisations in the country.
Chaired by Victoria Purman.
The transformative excitement of university life has been little mined by Australian fiction. In their immensely readable and impressively complex debut novels, Diana Reid and Indyana Schneider explore that most liminal time of campus life to excellent effect. Diana’s Love and Virtue traverses feminism, sexuality and the precocious intellectualism of first year life on a Sydney campus. Indyana Schneider weaves music, literature, art, dance, sex and the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love into student life at Oxford.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson.
Charlotte McConaghy’s follow-up to her intense and acclaimed The Last Migration is Once There Were Wolves. Biologist Inti Flynn returns to Scotland with her twin sister Aggie on a quest to reintroduce fourteen grey wolves to the remote Highlands. Facing opposition from the local farmers, Inti’s project becomes increasingly challenging. And then a local farmer turns up dead. A compelling combination of literary fiction and murder mystery, Once There Were Wolves is lush, vivid and propulsively gripping.
Chaired by Paul Barclay.
Three high profile lawyers discuss how they use their legal practice to advance important causes. David Barnden represented the students in Sharma v Minister for the Environment (2021) which found that Minister Ley had a duty of care to the next generation. Michael Bradley’s clients include survivors of sexual violence, Indian Australians locked out of Australia, and refugees imprisoned in Australian hotels. Terri Janke’s True Tracks framework of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property principles has been transformative for the protection of communities’ copyright and the prevention of cultural theft.
Chaired by Ben Brooker.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s remarkable Say Nothing documented the Troubles in Northern Ireland and was named by The New York Times as one of the best books of 2019. His follow up is Empire of Pain, an equally powerful account of the opioid crisis gripping America and the family that created it and continues to profit from it. Patrick meticulously chronicles the rise of the Sackler family, whose company invented the highly addictive OxyContin, and damns a country too cowed by money to protect its own citizens.
Chaired by Michael Williams.
In best-selling author Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, star-crossed lovers Greek Christian Kostas and Turkish Muslim Defne navigate the violence of the partition of Cyprus to eventually find safety in London. Elif’s last novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. This stunningly original follow-up is a beautifully crafted story of love, loss and belonging, infused with the humanity and heart that is the hallmark of Elif’s acclaimed writings.
Co-presented by The Wheeler Centre.
Join bestselling YA fantasy author CS Pacat (the Fenceseries) debut author Lyndall Clipstone (Lakesedge) as they discuss YA fantasy and the drive towards the dark side. What accounts for our fascination with dark themes in YA and what rich motifs do these authors mine when forming their fantasy worlds?
The Adelaide Writers' Week Microstory Competition is on again in 2022! Supported by 9News, this competition invites young people aged under 18 to submit a microstory of 50 words or less.
In 2022, the theme for the story is A Better Picture (this is also the theme of Writers' Week in 2022). The winner will receive a $500 gift card courtesy of 9News and a YA Day book pack courtesy of Writers' Week.
Come along for the announcement of the winner and a reading of the winning story!
Supported by Channel 9
SA author Karen Wyld will offer insights into the early resistance fighters, collaborators, inventors and dreamers featured in her middle grade book Heroes, Rebels and Innovators: Inspiring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People from History. She’ll explore how we can be inspired by individuals from the past to take on current challenges and create a better future.
Inspired by historical events, Katrina Nannestad’s We Are Wolves and Rabbit, Soldier, Angel, Thief are stories where children are the innocent victims of war and bravely battle the odds to overcome grand world events. In this session, Katrina discusses the lessons of adversity and the inspiring real stories behind her novels.
In a special one-off event, Australia’s favourite kids comedy duo The Listies (ABC TV’s The Listies Work For Peanuts) are coming to Adelaide Writers' Week! Join us for 40 minutes of madcap fun that only The Listies can make!
Hometown Haunts is a #LoveOzYa homegrown horror anthology featuring some of SA’s finest authors. Join editor and contributing author Poppy Nwosu in a conversation with writers Vikki Wakefield, Jared Thomas and Sarah Epstein. They’ll explore some of the most beloved and thrilling tropes and themes of the horror genre – from body horror to the supernatural, hauntings to everyday evils.
Comedian Matt Okine’s debut novel, Being Black ‘n Chicken, & Chips, burst onto the scene with an hilarious and often heartbreaking story about trying to grow up when everything is falling apart. For all its humour, Matt gives voice to lived experiences of third culture kids and awkward teenagers everywhere. In this unmissable session, Matt reveals the layers behind the laughs.
Coming to Writers' Week for the first time, John Flanagan is primed to meet the legions of fans of his Ranger’s Apprentice and Brotherband adventure series. In conversation with Clare Sawyer, John takes readers through the themes that have kept him fascinated while writing these long-running series. Prepare to be enlightened by the hidden layers within these famous epic journeys and find out why they’ve sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide.
Poetry in Performance
Writers’ Week’s favourite showcase of slam poetry and spoken word performance returns to the Plane Tree Stage on Sunday featuring performances from poets striding the local, national and international stages.
Hear Me Roar! MC Sarah Jane Justice will be joined by an impressive line-up, including Evelyn Araluen, Sara Mansour, Huda the Goddess, Tracey O'Callaghan, Tyberius Larking, Pola Fanous, Isi Ferguson, and special guest from the UK Joelle Taylor.
Chaired by Annabel Crabb
Sean Kelly describes The Game, his illuminating and deliciously readable take on Prime Minister Scott Morrison, as something akin to literary fiction, a critique of the flat character Morrison has assiduously created for the cameras, as conveyed to us through the pages of the press. Annika Smethurst’s The Accidental Prime Minister rigorously fills in the gaps in Morrison’s story. Both books help us understand more about the politician and the man behind the selfies.
Chaired by Collette Snowden
Liane Moriarty is one of Australia’s most successful authors. Her books have sold over twenty million copies worldwide, with two – Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers – triumphantly adapted into television series starring Nicole Kidman. Liane makes her Writers’ Week debut with her ninth book, Apples Never Fall, at once a compelling mystery and a satisfying family drama, and a fine exemplar of Liane’s signature combination of domestic realism and noirish mystery.
Chaired by Cath Kenneally.
Dual Miles Franklin Award-winner Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters tells the stories of two immigrant Australians, both of Asian heritage: Lili, a 22-year-old in 1980s France, and Lyle, living in a near future semi-dystopian Australia ravaged by bushfires, intolerance and capitalism. Set in the past and the future, Scary Monsters is a supremely contemporary novel, with a sharp dark humour that belies the seriousness of the themes it explores, and an audacious reversible format that acts as a playful physical embodiment of the migrant’s disorientation.
Chaired by Clive Hamilton
In January 2020, Wuhan was placed in total lockdown, leaving its residents anxious and afraid, struggling to find medicine, food and information about the strange new virus that left them trapped them in their homes. In Deadly Quiet City, one of China’s most celebrated authors, Murong Xuecen, goes in search of stories from Wuhan's 76-day lockdown. Eight people – including an exhausted doctor and a citizen journalist – share their lives and their grief as the catastrophe unfolded. Revealing truths about people, the pandemic and China today, Deadly Quiet City is a haunting documentation of modern history.
Chaired by Jo Dyer
Since leaving office, former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have definitely and determinedly not gone gentle into the good night, instead becoming trenchant critics of the incumbent Prime Minister and his Government, and the type of politics they practise. Focussing particularly on the pernicious power of Murdoch and the urgency of action on climate change, this unlikely duo remain important and unapologetic voices in our increasingly polarised political debate.
Chaired by Natasha Cica
When Annabel Crabb and bestie Leigh Sales started a little podcast in 2014, they never imagined the cult following they would generate. Rambling conversations that traverse books, television, film, friendship, cooking and more, Chat 10 Looks 3 has inspired tens of thousands of passionate “Chatters” and now a book, Well Hello. Annabel and her other partner-in-crime and co-author, editor of the Chat newsletter Miranda Murphy, discuss the runaway success of the podcast, the book and all things Chat.
Chaired by David Sly
Well-known to listeners of ABC RN’s The Health Report, Norman Swan’s clear commentary and advice on COVID-19 elevated him to a new level of prominence as his Coronacast podcast became one of the most trusted sources of information in a time of competing and sometimes hysterical claims about the scary new virus sweeping the globe. Norman’s new book, So You Think You Know What’s Good For You?, takes a comprehensive and common-sense look at how to “cut the bull” to live a healthy life.
Chaired by Jared Thomas.
Hugely popular and award-winning author Anita Heiss’s new novel opens with a fictionalised account of 1852’s Gundagai floods, still Australia’s deadliest. But for the heroic efforts of Wiradyuri men Yarri and Jacky Jacky, the toll would have been much higher. Yarri’s daughter Wagadhaany survives the flood only to become an indentured slave to the settlers her father rescued. A nuanced examination of Black and White relations, a celebration of family and Country, and a literary celebration of the Wiradyuri language, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is Anita’s finest book yet.
The Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature are presented every two years during Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Introduced in 1986 by the Government of South Australia, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature celebrate South Australia’s writing culture by offering national and state-based literary prizes, as well as fellowships for South Australian writers.
Managed by the State Library of South Australia, the awards provide an opportunity to highlight the importance of our unique South Australian writers, and contribute to and support community engagement with literature.
Be the first to learn the winners of South Australia’s richest literary awards at this special event celebrating the country’s finest writers. Winners across the categories of Fiction, Non-fiction, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, as well as Poetry and the Jill Blewett Playwright’s Award, will be announced and speak on the day.
Chaired by Kate Mildenhall.
Two of 2021’s most innovative and engrossing books have works of art at their heart. Claire Thomas’s The Performance is set over a single theatrical performance, and uses the potent image of the trapped Winnie in Beckett’s masterpiece Happy Days to explore the colliding but disparate lives of three women. Angela O’Keeffe’s Night Blue is audaciously told from the perspective of our National Gallery’s most famous acquisition, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, as it examines an artist’s life and the eternal conundrum of great art that springs from monstrous creators.
Chaired by Sharon Davis.
In this compelling account of contemporary conspiracies, the internet’s dark corners, and those who inhabit both, Van Badham dives deep into the world of Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon and more. With a new capacity to cross-pollinate with each other and online, the wild nature of the tales from this new brand of conspiracist may sound funny – Lizard People anyone? – but they leave a trail of devastation in their wake. QAnon and On lays it all bare.
Chaired by Nicole Abadee.
Charlotte Wood and Christos Tsiolkas are two of our most acclaimed and best loved authors, rigorous, generous, and excavators of humanity’s hidden depths. In this special conversation, Charlotte and Christos draw on their most recent books – Charlotte’s study of creativity The Luminous Solution and Christos’s autofiction 7 ½ – to discuss how they function as artists, the challenges of a creative life and how they lived through the surreal ride of the pandemic.
Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.
Chaired by Kate Mildenhall.
Catapulted to literary stardom with her non-fiction bestseller Three Women, acclaimed for its radical candour in discussing sex, Lisa Taddeo’s debut novel is no less bold. Concerned with the link between trauma and sexual violence, Animal tells the story of voracious obsessive anti-hero Joan as she flees a dramatically failed love affair in New York to confront unfinished business in LA. Infused with bravado, psychological acuity and sly wit, and full of one-liners and simmering emotion, Animal is a sensational novel of female revenge.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham.
Jennifer Mills follows up her Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia with the arresting The Airways, a story of memory, reality and the banality of violence. Set between contemporary Sydney and a hyper-real Beijing, The Airways is a hugely original ghost story, a powerful examination of the relationship between the body and the self, violence and the violated, marked by the sensory immersive prose that has become the hallmark of one of Australia’s most interesting and ambitious authors.
Chaired by Jane Howard.
In her warm and witty memoir, Late Bloomer, Clem Bastow writes how her life was transformed after she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as an adult. Journalist turned academic Emma Jane’s candid and darkly humorous memoir Diagnosis Normal describes the many lives she lived with gusto before embracing a new life when she too had a late diagnosis of autism. Both books are funny, poignant and provide illuminating insight into the experience of living as a neurodiverse person in a neurotypical world.
Co-presented by Centre for Ideas, University of NSW.
When Vikki Wakefield’s This is How We Change the Ending won the 2020 CBCA’s Award for Book of the Year: Older Readers, it cemented her reputation as an author of incredible power and empathy. Join moderator Clare Sawyer to find out why and how Vikki can write “from inside a teen boys head, illuminating his thoughts and words with searing understanding and empathy, along with hints of hope.” (The Australian)
Chaired by Clare Sawyer
After the blockbuster success of Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey’s highly anticipated new novel is Honeybee. Chronicling the coming of age of its transgender narrator, Sam, the story opens with Sam and another despairing soul standing on an overpass ready to end it all. Sam and Vic save each other and their tentative friendship gives them their first reason to live. Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, Honeybee is a deeply empathetic novel of identity, vulnerability and masculinity.
Chaired by Yves Rees
Described by The Observer as one of the “world’s leading thinkers”, global economist Noreena Hertz dissects the contemporary epidemic of loneliness in The Lonely Century. This meticulously researched and highly readable book describes how we have become alienated from each other, and analyses the structures, influences and trends that cause and exacerbate our isolation. The Lonely Century is an urgent message about one of the most far-reaching issues of our time.
Chaired by Natasha Cica
Pulitzer prize-winning author and historian Anne Applebaum deconstructs the psychology and motivations of today’s crazed conspiracy theorists and populists in Twilight of Democracy, an incisive examination of the longstanding struggle between democracy and dictatorship. Drawing on experience and high-level relationships forged across Europe and America, and an exemplary understanding of contemporary and historical politics, Twilight of Democracy is a confronting and illuminating analysis of a polarised world.
Chaired by Sally Warhaft
Do Australians extend the right of free speech only to those we agree with, saying things we approve of? In Truth is Trouble: The Strange Case of Israel Folau, or How Free Speech Became So Complicated, Malcolm Knox documents the curious case of how footballer Israel Folau became the centre of our free speech debate. Patrick Mullins’ The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin Brought Down Australia’s Censorship System, recounts the pervasive literary censorship of our puritanical past, brought to an abrupt end with Portnoy’s Complaint and Penguin’s brave decision to publish and be damned. Malcolm and Patrick discuss our history of censorship and today’s fraught debate around bigotry and cancel culture.
Chaired by David Marr
It began with Australia ablaze and ended with a scramble to avoid the latest cluster of the clusterf that was COVID-19. In between were floods, flailing democracies, dodged accountabilities, and a weird fugue that swallowed April – July. It’s no wonder we emerged from 2020 wondering: “What just happened?”. Sophie Cunningham’s Fire Flood Plague pondered just that. She facilitates a conversation with contributors Richard McGregor and Gabrielle Chan, joined by Danielle Celermajer, whose essay collection Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future* is an an urgent elegy for looming loss.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham
When historian Mark McKenna set out to write a history of Uluru, he had no idea where the story would take him. Researching the shooting death of an Aboriginal man by policeman Bill McKinnon, Mark uncovered shocking evidence that was typical of Australian frontier justice, and astonishing in its contemporary resonance. With support from the families of key individuals, and the assistance of South Australian Museum, Mark uncovered critical new evidence, and Return to Uluru became a true crime story of the most explosive kind, and an important exploration of what truth telling and reconciliation means in practice.
Chaired by Jared Thomas
When should you start to think about your author brand? How are you going to promote your message and when should you connect with your audience? Featuring Scribe Publications Publicity Manager Cora Roberts and novelist and critic Jessie Tu, this event will give aspiring authors practical tips on all the ins and outs of promotion, including creating and curating a brand, time-management, self-promotion and working with an in-house marketing team.
Hosted by Georgia Richter
Part memoir, part love letter to her favourite books and authors, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s first collection of essays, The Details: On Love, Death and Reading, evokes Blake’s observation that one can see “a World in a Grain of Sand.” The detail is the point, she writes. Drawing on noted authors including Jane Austen, George Saunders, S. J. Perelman and particularly Helen Garner, Tegan skillfully blends observations about writing and reading with recollections from her own life, from the profound to the everyday, to moving, inspiring and sometimes hilarious effect.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson
Why is it that, despite overwhelming popular support for action on Climate Change, Australia has been a policy laggard in this area? One of Australia’s most respected investigative journalists Marian Wilkinson tells all in The Carbon Club. Revealing the network of powerful climate change sceptics, politicians and business leaders who have sought to control Australia’s climate policy, and with extraordinary access to players from all sides, Marian has written a riveting and disturbing account of the self-interest and betrayal behind Australia’s criminally poor response to Climate Change.
Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs
The man who invented “cyberspace”, William Gibson is one of the most influential writers of our time. From his groundbreaking debut novel Neuromancer, to his latest bestseller Agency, he was the first to imagine a computer-saturated existence, grounded in an all-too-material world, and to anticipate its implications. The philosophies and practicalities of the near futures of his books stem from a deep and fascinated engagement with the present, as embodied in his most famous aphorism: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Chaired by James Bradley
Soldier-scholar David Kilcullen is Australia’s most influential contemporary military strategist. A former adviser to General Petraeus and former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his new book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, examines the complex new world of modern warfare, featuring the state competitor “dragons” and the non-state guerrilla and terrorist players, the “snakes.” A remarkable synthesis of three decades of military and political history, this expert analysis of the new nature of conflict is as illuminating as it is disturbing.
Chaired by Rick Sarre
When should you choose self-publication over publication? What does a self-publishing writer need to know about production, printing, design, promotion and distribution – and which path is right for you? Get the nuts and bolts of self-publication with Deborah Lee of Ingram Spark and author Maria Lewis, who has both self-published and been commissioned by a major publishing house.
Hosted by Georgia Richter
In Richard Fidler’s love letter to the city of Prague, The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague, he describes it as a city “written in pencil, erased, rewritten and erased again... a fabulous palimpsest of stories.” Richard interweaves his own visits, experiences and impressions of Prague with its broader history, giving us a brilliant living portrait of a city of fairy tales, violent crusades and dark secrets. His passion and love for the city infuse the pages of a book that captures its very essence.
Chaired by David Sly
Royce Kurmelovs’ finances were shredded when, uninsured, he hit another car. Rick Morton grew up in poverty, a household that struggled to afford birthday gifts and in which an unexpected bill could mean a choice between food and electricity. Royce’s Just Money: Misadventures in the Great Australian Debt Trap and Rick’s On Money are illuminating explorations of the debt industry and its shakedown of the poor and the desperate, and the strange moral meaning we – one of the most indebted nations in the world – ascribe to both the having and owing of money.
Chaired by David Sly
Emily St. John Mandel’s exquisite new novel tells of the porous boundaries between past and present, rich and poor, living and dead. The Glass Hotel follows tough and beautiful Vincent, whose fall off a container ship into a storm-tossed ocean opens and closes the book, and of Jonathan, who whisks Vincent off into the “kingdom of money”, but whose wealth is a Bernie Madoff-esque mirage. With its intricate, interlocking narratives, and rich haunting prose, The Glass Hotel is a beguiling puzzle of a book that is a joy to solve.
Chaired by Caroline Baum
Hugh Mackay has made a lifelong study of the attitudes and behaviours of Australians, researching who we are, and why we behave as we do, for nearly sixty years. In his potent new book, The Inner Self, Hugh returns to his psychology roots and turns his gaze inwards, bypassing our socially constructed identities to explore our deeper, more private sense of self. He invites us to find a path to psychological freedom by answering that most challenging and confronting of questions: Who am I, really?
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
When his father died unexpectedly at 59, Christopher Pyne learned that life is short in the toughest possible way. He became a man in a hurry, and fought his way into Federal Parliament at the tender age of 25, knifing his erstwhile mentor to get there. A confidante to and tactician for multiple Prime Ministers, Christopher rose to become one of SA’s most powerful – and entertaining – political figures. In The Insider: The Scoops, the Scandals and the Serious Business within the Canberra Bubble, he writes with verve, wit and candour about what Annabel Crabb calls “a truly bonkers period of political history.”
Chaired by Sally Warhaft
One of Australia’s greatest writers and seer of our times, Booker Prize-winner Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams describes the end of a family and the end of the world. Documenting the slow death of a matriarch in a Hobart hospital, and the tumult it causes amongst her children, this achingly sad but still hopeful novel deploys magical realism, black humour and Richard’s masterfully poetic prose to explore the way humanity loves, neglects and destroys itself and the beautiful world it inhabits.
Chaired by Chris Flynn
The world shifted slowly, then so fast, while they watched but didn’t see.
In Kate Mildenhall’s compulsive The Mother Fault, Mim’s comfortable, micro-chipped life in suburban Melbourne and her assumptions about the neutrality of the omniscient Department are upended when her husband Ben goes missing while working in Indonesia. Set in a near future and very recognisable Australia, The Mother Fault is at once a literary thriller, a family drama and a riveting exploration of the consequences of a passive population and the costs – and rewards – of fighting back.
Chaired by Cath Kenneally
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing is the epic, multigenerational tale of the Tran family, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Spanning the French colonial period to the present day, we follow the lives of matriarch Diệu Lan and her granddaughter Huong. Diệu Lan tells Huong of Vietnam’s taboo on discussing “the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history.” With luminous prose and a compelling immersive story, The Mountains Sing breaks that silence.
Chaired by Caroline Baum
Distinguished historian Jenny Hocking fought for over a decade for access to correspondence between Governor General John Kerr and Buckingham Palace about the sacking of Gough Whitlam. Classified by the Palace as “personal correspondence”, Jenny finally secured their release in June 2020 following a landmark High Court judgment that decreed they were Commonwealth records. In her new book, The Palace Letters, Jenny discusses the implications of the Letters and their release for transparency and accountability in our democratic system, and for Australian democracy itself.
Chaired by Mark McKenna
In her book, The Music Advantage: How Learning Music Helps Your Child’s Brain and Wellbeing, Dr Anita Collins outlines the remarkable and surprising benefits that playing – or even just appreciating – music offers children. An expert in cognitive development and passionate music educator, Anita visited classrooms and leading music and neurological research labs around the world to investigate the extraordinary impact music can have on the development of young brains. The Music Advantage is the impressive result.\
Chaired by Hannah Critchlow
In Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls, Brigid sets off on an epic journey with her twin babies, one white and one black, searching for lost love. Nardi Simpson’s Song of the Crocodile introduces us to the Billymil family, living with its community on the fringes of Darnmoor, “the Gateway to Happiness”. Both novels are award winning, immersive stories of family, Country and history that powerfully weave rich narratives and magical realism with the enduring tragic legacy of colonialism.
Chaired by Natalie Harkin
From the award winning author of the celebrated East West Street comes the real life thriller The Ratline, a mesmerising biography of a devoted husband, father and war criminal. The story of the life and mysterious death of Nazi leader turned fugitive Otto von Wächter, the richly detailed and beautifully crafted The Ratline draws on the family archives of Otto’s son and Philippe’s friend Horst to explore humanity’s capacity for love and evil, and ask if one can redeem the other.
Chaired by Rick Sarre
The Murray-Darling Basin is dying. Despite its catastrophic plight, and the devastating findings of the South Australian Royal Commission, policy is corrupted, neglected or ignored. Richard Beasley draws on his experience as Counsel Assisting the Royal Commission in Dead in the Water, a book that is simultaneously hilarious and deadly serious, and very, very angry. Margaret Simons’ celebrated Quarterly Essay, Cry Me A River (QE77), is both a portrait and explanation of our current predicament. Grant Rigney is the Director of the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations.
Chaired by Rick Sarre
As the Lockdowns of 2020 began, Laura Jean McKay’s story of a world collapsing in the midst of a viral epidemic, The Animals in That Country, seized the popular imagination: a hallucinogenic tale of Zoo Flu with wild symptoms that enable inter-species communication. Emily St. John Mandel’s break-out novel Station Eleven is a gripping, eerie story of civilisation’s collapse in the wake of a flu that wipes out 99% of the world’s population. It sold nearly two million copies worldwide. Both are prescient, terrifying and ultimately hopeful.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham
With over half a million Australians joining Kevin Rudd’s call for a Royal Commission into News Corp and the concentration of media power in this country, Australians are increasingly turning to other, more independent outlets for their news. Editor-in-Chief of veteran online newsletter Crikey! Peter Fray, independent journalist and media analyst Margaret Simons and founder of michaelwest.com.au, business writer Michael West discuss the rise of independent media and what we gain – and lose – from the increased proliferation of new media.
Chaired by David Washington
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Shadow King is a powerful, poetic book about women soldiers during the Italian Ethiopian war of 1935, the first main conflict of World War II. Drawing on the life of Maaza’s own grandmother, it tells the story of Hirut, whose daring plan saves morale when Emperor Selassie goes into exile, only to end up a prisoner of one of Italy’s most brutal officers. A captivating study of female power with an indelible, inspirational heroine at its heart.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin
Pip Williams’ wonderful novel The Dictionary of Lost Words documents the origin of the Oxford Dictionary through the tale of the fictional Esme Nicoll who observes how some words were valued more than others and seeks to rectify it. Sue Butler was Editor of the Macquarie Dictionary for decades, where she oversaw the inclusion of new words. Her new book is the highly entertaining Rebel Without a Clause. Losing the Linguistic plot... Pip and Sue discuss the attraction and fluidity of language, and how dictionaries shape and reflect their times.
Chaired by Victoria Purman
Insults flying via Twitter, lobsters dying on the tarmac in Shanghai, Ministers’ phone calls snubbed by their counterparts: how has our relationship with China come to this? Former Australian Ambassador to China Geoff Raby explores China’s newly assertive place in the world and the implications for Australia in his new book, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order. He is joined by Chongyi Feng to discuss what – if anything – can be done to repair this critical geopolitical and economic relationship.
Chaired by Richard McGregor
In his harrowing memoir, Fourteen: My Year of Darkness, and the light that followed, Shannon Molloy details the violence and fear he perpetually suffered growing up as an effeminate boy deep in regional Queensland. Ronnie Scott’s debut novel, The Adversary, is a sly, dry account of the inner-city world of endless student summers, cheap wine and Grindr; the like of which a young Shannon could only dream. How individuals cope and grow, and how this is reflected in worlds changing around them, is explored in these very different but equally engaging accounts of gay life in Australia.
Chaired by Rick Morton
The devastating effect of mental health afflictions and their impact on both the individual and their nearest and dearest is sensitively and sometimes hilariously explored by Meg Mason and Luke Horton in their respective novels, Sorrow and Bliss and The Fogging. Full of spiky wit and vivid observation, Sorrow and Bliss looks back on a wrecked marriage. The Fogging documents a relationship breakdown with pathos, documenting with prickly precision the anxiety that plagues our protagonist.
Chaired by Jo Case
Robert Dessaix’s new book is an essential companion for those pondering how to age well, and cogitating on what life is all about anyway. The Time of Our Lives: Growing Older Well posits that a rich inner life is key to both and enables readers to share in Robert’s sharp, expansive, witty exploration of his own inner world. Reflecting on time, religion, painting, dancing, family and more, this is a wise and timely exploration of the challenges and possibilities of ageing.
Chaired by Chris Flynn
Join broadcaster, author, comedian and host of 2021’s all-Australian Authorial Voice Sami Shah as he talks to a panel who are comfortable Leaving It All on the Page. Rick Morton (My Year of Living Vulnerably, One Hundred Years of Dirt), Yves Rees (winner of the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize) and Jessie Tu (A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing) sit down with Sami to debate the challenges, liberation and excruciating vulnerability of mining your own life and self for your writing.
Liberated from the tropes of tragedy that have dominated previous accounts, Cassandra Pybus’ biography of Nuenonne woman Truganini finally does justice to this remarkable woman. Posthumously and falsely named “the Last Tasmanian Aboriginal”, Truganini is revealed to be a woman of great strength, resilience and agency, a renowned swimmer, nimble negotiator, lover of nature and children, and master of adaptation. Inspired by her own family’s connection to Nuenonne country, Cassandra is joined by Ian Anderson to discuss Truganini’s life and legacy.
Chaired by Natasha Cica
As the sun sets, the heat recedes and work is done for the day, the bar is open and the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden is the place to be as some of Writers’ Week favourite guests, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Robbie Arnott, Durkhanai Ayubi, Geoff Goodfellow, Andrew Kwong, Mirandi Riwoe and Nardi Simpson, embrace the informality of our Twilight Talks and reveal their unfiltered selves. An all-Australian, all-star line-up have ten minutes to contemplate their lives, passions, preoccupations and the hell of a year we’ve all just endured as they reflect on the challenge of trying to stay balanced while standing on Unstable Ground.
Hosted by Jo Dyer, this event is a wonderful way to experience an overview of who and what Writers’ Week has to offer if you can't join us during the day.
With wit, wisdom and endless curiosity, Don Watson has spent a lifetime writing on subjects as diverse as they are entertaining. This definitive anthology reveals the remarkable depth of his interests and erudition, with articles, essays and insights on subjects ranging from Australian humour, American politics, Don Bradman and Oscar Wilde. Speechwriter, humorist, biographer, lecturer, critic and provocateur, self-described accidental writer Don has traversed almost as many genres of writing as he has subjects: Watsonia: A Writing Life is a collection of his wide-ranging best.
Chaired by Tom Wright
Sigrid Nunez took twenty-five years to become an overnight success with her seventh book, the National Book Award winning The Friend, the story of a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend with the help of a Great Dane. Its narrator returns in her new book, What Are You Going Through? with another intimate spare story in which she helps her friend prepare for the end after a cancer diagnosis. A beautiful meditation on friendship, mortality and grief infused with generosity and wit.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson
Robbie Arnott burst on to the literary scene with his gloriously imaginative debut, Flames, a novel of stylistic ingenuity that traversed genres with dense poetic prose. His new book The Rain Heron is similarly inventive, the story of a mythic bird with extraordinary powers, able to save and destroy the land, both hunted and protected by flawed humans. With lush lyrical language, The Rain Heron is at once ecological parable and thriller, and an audacious, immersive work from one of Australia’s most original new talents.
Chaired by Jane Howard
Two of our most incisive political analysts examine the state of leadership in Australia. Drawing on their recent Quarterly Essays, Laura Tingle (Follow the Leader – Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman QE71 and The High Road: What Australia Can Learn from New Zealand QE80) and Katharine Murphy (The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics QE79) explore whether #scottyfrommarketing offers more than photo opportunities, if Albo missed his moment, and what we want and should demand from those who would lead us.
Chaired by Sharon Davis
Even before we emerged blinking from Iso and the year that was 2020, we started to ask, “What Happens Next?”. Executive Director of Per Capita Emma Dawson coedited an anthology with this title, exploring how we can ensure we learn the right lessons from the COVID crisis. She is joined by Chief Economist of the Australia Institute Richard Denniss and Gideon Haigh, whose book, The Momentous, Uneventful Day: a Requiem for the Office looks at the implications 2020’s flight from the office has had on our working lives.
Chaired by Sharon Davis
Born of Louise Milligan’s own brutal experience as a witness in the Cardinal Pell case, Witness is at once a gripping, powerful, meticulously researched critique of our criminal justice system, and an eloquent and empathetic argument for change. Including the accounts of victims retraumatised by their courtroom experience alongside expert opinions and analysis from legal practitioners - including defence counsel, prosecutors, judges and academics - Witness lays bare the flaws of our adversarial system, and the devastating impact they can have on the delivery of justice.
Chaired by Natasha Cica
The message from Julia Gillard and her co-author, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to young female aspirants to public life in Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons is “Be aware, not beware!”. Containing interviews with eight impressive world leaders, including Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde and Jacinda Ardern, and drawing on the results of research and global surveys conducted by Julia’s London-based Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Women and Leadership provides an important and comprehensive analysis of the contemporary role of gender in access to and perceptions of leadership.
Chaired by Jo Dyer
Malcolm Knox and Jacqueline Maley are highly respected journalists, each a recipient of Australian journalism’s highest honour, the Walkley Award. But beyond the world of reporting, each has chosen to mine their imagination to great effect. Now with six novels to his name, Malcolm’s latest is Bluebird, an incisive satire on the Australian Dream, set amongst sand and surf and broken dreams, that once again demonstrates his mastery of contemporary realism. Jacqueline’s acclaimed debut novel is The Truth About Her¸ another slice of social realism that deals with the fallout from the suicide of a wellness blogger following a hard hitting expose by an investigative journalist.
Chaired by Tali Lavi
Match wits with the Word Spy! Join the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2021, Ursula Dubosarsky (aka The Word Spy) for an entertaining quiz for children about the mysteries and wonders of WORDS and all things wordy. This is a recording, but... you can still play without cheating!
Colum McCann’s profoundly moving masterpiece, Apeirogon, is based on a true story of a friendship between “An Israeli, against the Occupation. A Palestinian, studying the Holocaust.” United by the devastation of losing a daughter to political violence, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan together tell their daughters’ stories over and over, to anyone that will listen, in an attempt to bring a peaceful resolution to the endless conflict. Colum’s radically empathetic novel is infused with both desperate hope and poetic power.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham
Trent Dalton’s dazzling debut, Boy Swallows Universe, became the fastest selling Australian fiction debut ever, selling over half a million copies in Australia alone. His highly anticipated follow up, All Our Shimmering Skies, is set in Darwin in 1942 and is a sweeping mythological odyssey of love and adventure, magical and masterfully imaginative, populated by a Dickensian cast of finely drawn colourful characters, led by gravedigger’s daughter Molly Hook, a tenacious spirit as full of heart and hope as the novel she inhabits.
Chaired by Anton Enus
When Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister in September 2015, Australians of all political persuasion breathed a sigh of relief that the hyperpartisan chaos of the Abbott Administration was over. They forgave him the way he claimed the top job in a way they never did Julia Gillard. Three years and one knife-edge election later, he too was gone. Malcolm talks to Anthony Durkin about his journey to the top of Australian politics, what it is like to lead and to be so peremptorily dispatched, and what he makes of it all now.
Chaired by Anthony Durkin
Kate Grenville’s latest novel A Room Made of Leaves continues the disruption of conventional colonial narratives that began with her acclaimed The Secret River. What if Elizabeth, wife of the colonial monster John Macarthur, left behind brutally frank secret memoirs, she asks? And they told the real story behind the myth of the 18th century wife? Playful and audacious, this astonishing literary achievement delves into history to examine the very contemporary issues of fake stories and hidden truths, and where stories originate.
Chaired by Clare Wright
Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for his debut novel, The Zookeeper’s War, Steven Conte returns to World War II for his stunning new book, The Tolstoy Estate. It is 1941 and Hitler has repeated Napoleon’s fatal misstep of invading Russia. In winter. A German medical unit find themselves quartered at Yasnaya Polyana, the ancestral estate of Tolstoy, where surgeon Paul Bauer becomes enthralled by its Director and the legacy of the great Tolstoy that surrounds them. An epic, ambitious tale of love, war and literature.
Chaired by Ashley Hay
Based on the oral histories of the Darug people, Julie Janson has said that her ambitious and illuminating new novel, Benevolence, was written as an Aboriginal response to The Secret River. Muraging – a character inspired by Julie’s own great-great-grandmother – is given over to the Native Institution as a pupil by her father, a “benevolent” institution providing Christian discipline and education, and thereby becomes the first person in the novel to be sacrificed to the good intentions of the waibala.
Chaired by Caroline Baum
Musician, writer, author, activist, cultural commentator and all-round powerhouse, Briggs speaks truth to power in a myriad of poetic, hilarious, high impact ways. His latest project is a celebration of Aboriginal excellence, children’s book Our Home, Our Heartbeat. He talks about the many avenues of his activism, and the inspiration he provides for and draws from the next generation of Black leaders.
Chaired by Karen Wyld
Rebecca Huntley (How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference) and Jonica Newby (Beyond Climate Grief) discuss ways to shake off ennui and/or exit the echo chamber to effect change on the most pressing issue of our time, the climate crisis. These two leading thinkers offer a way to move beyond our polarised debate and create understanding and incite action.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin
Developing a clear vision, a fairer world, a utopia, is done slowly, over time, with care, commitment, courage and creativity. Jess Scully has travelled the world, exploring the many ways people of imagination are grasping the mettle to reshape our world into a fairer and more sustainable place. How can we help? In Glimpses of Utopia, Jess counts the ways.
Chaired by Hannah Critchlow
Effecting change can be hard, requiring effort, energy and organisation. Sally Rugg (How Powerful We Are) demonstrated all these, and no small degree of elan, when she assumed a leading role in the successful campaign for marriage equality. Jean Hinchliffe (Lead the Way) is following in her impressive footsteps as leader of the School Strikes 4 Climate. These two inspiring leaders discuss the power of taking action.
Chaired by Sophie Cunningham
Australian crime writers are riding a wave of global success, consistently creating compelling and charismatic characters who investigate heinous crimes with tenacity and often dry humour. Emma Viskic’s celebrated Caleb Zelic series, featuring a Deaf, articulate, obstinate, brilliant outsider as the private investigator protagonist, launched in 2016 with Resurrection Bay, with the recent Darkness for Light the third in the series. Chris Hammer’s debut Scrublands (2018) was a bestselling sensation, and his two follow up novels, Silver and Trust, all featuring the gritty and emotionally scarred journalist Martin Scarsden, have been equally acclaimed.
Emma and Chris talk to Cath Kenneally about crafting compelling protagonists, and the long-term commitment required to write a series.
The shocking image of planes smashing into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was a defining moment in the modern era. We now have a generation – Muslim and non-Muslim – who have grown up in the shadow of the War on Terror, with its associated Islamophobia, surveillance and suspicion. In her ambitious, rigorous and deeply compassionate new book, Coming of Age in the War on Terror, Randa Abdel-Fattah hears from the young people most affected by our polarised politics, providing important insight into their resilience, humour and heartbreak.
Chaired by Sami Shah
Was 2020 a year of rupture that will change what we do with what we have? How will it impact on our ideas of access and abundance, of security and agency? How will it alter the way we think about resources – tangible and intangible; animal, vegetable, mineral, more? Contributors Nardi Simpson, Clare Wright and Gabrielle Chan explore new ideas of trade and exchange, sustainability and story, in Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance, in conversation with Editor Ashley Hay.
An Elon Musk-style billionaire persuades scientist Kate Larkin to join his secretive new project. Its ambitious aim is to re-engineer our collapsing climate by resurrecting long extinct species, including our closest human relatives, the Neanderthals. James Bradley’s Ghost Species is both a compulsive page-turner and book of big ideas: a deft examination of scientific, corporate and personal ethics in our endangered world and an intimate and affecting account of love, motherhood and what it means to be human.
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning Hamnet gives us new and illuminating insight into Shakespeare and his masterpiece, and the family that nurtured him. Told from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife, this devastatingly beautiful novel takes as its starting point the true fact of the death of their 11 year old son, Hamnet (a variant on the more familiar Hamlet), and from there weaves a deeply moving story of family, love and, most profoundly, of grief, and the paths we must navigate through them.
Chaired by Anton Enus
Join a stellar lineup of South Australian First Nations writers Mandy Brown, Ali Cobby Eckerman, Natalie Harkin, Dominic Guerrera, Steven Pappin, Celestine Rowe, and MC Edoardo Crismani, and experience the depth and power of language in verse. With celebrated award-winning poets and some of the best emerging voices, First Words is an unmissable event in spoken word performance.
Presented by Writers SA
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the iconic City Series and the publication of updated versions on our eight capital cities, this special double event chaired by the infinitely expert George Megalogenis examines what makes each of our cities special through the eyes of authors who love and know them. As we emerge from the Great Lockdowns of 2020, when we were forced to stay home, and individual State borders slammed shut one after the other, it seems particularly appropriate to look at the personality of each capital – their skylines, cultures, architecture, and natural surrounds – and explore how they have changed over the last decade, and how they shape, excite, attract or infuriate their residents.
First we hear from Kerryn Goldsworthy (Adelaide), Sophie Cunningham (Melbourne), David Whish-Wilson (Perth) and Peter Timms (Hobart), and then Delia Falconer (Sydney), Matthew Condon (Brisbane), Paul Daley (Canberra) and Tess Lea (Darwin), before all authors return to the stage for questions from the audience and each other. Don’t miss this literary and cultural audit of the state of our cities, and their relationship to each other and the country.
Chaired by George Megalogenis
In this year’s lecture in memory of biographer Hazel Rowley, Jacqueline Kent, biographer of Vida Goldstein, Julia Gillard and Hephzibah Menuhin, turns the spotlight on herself and her brief but passionate relationship with Kenneth Cook, author of the novel Wake in Fright. Jacqueline discusses what happens when you become a character in your own story, and switch from describing others’ lives to tackle your own.
Megha Majumdar’s electric novel, A Burning, is the taut, riveting tale of three individuals whose lives become entangled in the aftermath of an horrific terrorist attack in Kolkata. Each have ambitions for themselves – Jivan, clawing her way out of the slum in which she lives, Lovely, the hijra intent on becoming a star, and PT Sir, a PE teacher who stumbles into right-wing political activism. But after a careless Facebook post, Jivan finds herself caught up in India’s corrupt legal system and her life hangs in the balance.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin
Compared by The New York Times to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Steinbeck’s mighty The Grapes of Wrath, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold? brilliantly reimagines both the American West and the Classic American Western. Longlisted for the Booker, it tells of Chinese American orphans Lucy and Sam’s quest through the Californian hills during the Gold Rush as they seek to bury the body of their father in a homeland that constantly tells them “this land is not your land.”
Chaired by Mirandi Riwoe
Join us for a session of exhilarating and inspiring spoken word performance showcasing poets invigorating our local and national stages, including Australian Slam Poetry Champions Ren Alessandra and Jesse Oliver, SA standout Slammers Chris Jaksa and Olenka Toroshenko plus Sarah Jane Justice, Hadley and Rameen Hayat.
Described by Richard Flanagan as the “best American novel I’ve read in years”, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies combines memoir and essay, fact and fiction to deliver a tour de force. How, his narrator asks, can he “express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art?”. This powerful, courageous and extraordinarily timely work is his answer, exploring not just the state of contemporary America in the Trump era, and the relationship between East and West, but searing questions of identity, family and art.
Chaired by Ben Brooker
A savage, violent howl of a book by one of Mexico’s most exciting writers, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season explores the deep misogyny and femicide of her country. The murder of the town “witch” is the book’s tragic centre, around which swirls streams of brutal, mesmerising, illuminating prose, each chapter told from the perspective of a different but always unreliable narrator. Shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is both a dark celebration of language and a powerful insight into a world of poverty, brutality and gore.
Chaired by Clare Wright
Gifted youngster Lawrence enjoys an idyllic childhood in regional Victoria, where he lives with his widowed mother and young brother at the foot of the Grampians. After taking his first painting class, he dives obsessively into an exhilarating world of light, colour and art, and thrives. But his world is shattered by the arrival of an interloper, and a devastating incident that follows. Sofie Laguna’s extraordinary and compassionate new book, Infinite Splendours, is a luminous and heartbreaking meditation on art, trauma, and innocence lost.
Chaired by Linda Jaivin
In Patrick Allington’s Rise & Shine, an environmental apocalypse has wiped out most of the population. Those that survive are nourished – literally – by the consumption of violent footage from the perpetual war waged between the two city-states of Rise and Shine. In Dennis Glover’s Factory 19, a Walshian figure leads a willing cohort back to the future to an enclave in Tasmania, where they search for happiness in an industrialised past. Both books offer surreal and darkly satirical takes on leadership, humanity and the common good.
Chaired by Geordie Williamson
What inner strength is required when your working day is filled with injury, death and despair? Rachael Mead and Benjamin Gilmour can tell us. In The Application of Pressure, novelist Rachael Mead introduces us to paramedics Tash and Joel as they traverse the streets of Adelaide in their ambulance, saving lives and lost souls. Benjamin Gilmour documents his own experience as a paramedic on the frontline, first at infamous Sydney suicide spot The Gap: A Paramedic’s Summer on the Edge, and then further afield in Paramedico: Around the World by Ambulance.
Chaired by Victoria Purman
Can works of fiction inform us more effectively than non-fiction? Chris Flynn and Laura Elvery’s audacious works illuminate history and offer critiques of today. Chris’s fantastical novel Mammoth is narrated by the fossilised remains of a 13,000 year old wise-cracking mammoth. Each of the twenty short stories in Laura Elvery’s collection Ordinary Matter is inspired by a Nobel Prize-winning female scientist. With their lateral approach to history, these unlikely starting points have resulted in richly rewarding and wildly imaginative outcomes.
Chaired by Danielle Clode
Does Australia have a problem with rent-seekers, well-connected insiders who have their snouts firmly in the public trough, enriching themselves and their mates at the expense of the rest of us? Why is it that the majority of our Rich-Listers accrued their wealth from favourable treatment in heavily regulated industries? The Australia Institute’s Chief Economist Richard Denniss, co-author of Games of Mates (with Paul Frijters), Cameron Murray and Marian Wilkinson (The Carbon Club) examine the cosy club of political insiders and this particularly Australian way to make money.
Chaired by Michael West
When Danielle Clode set out to research In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World, about the first woman to circumnavigate the earth, she discovered scant details of an impoverished French peasant who embarked on her voyage disguised as a man. Judith Hoare’s The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code is the overdue account of Australian Dr Claire Weekes, whose pioneering work on anxiety and depression still forms the basis of much contemporary treatment. Danielle and Judith reflect on these groundbreaking but overlooked women, and why women are written out of history.
Chaired by Collette Snowden
Updated to include contemporary events of 2020, Andrew Fowler’s account of Julian Assange’s rise and fall is a damning indictment of the lengths to which Western Governments will go to keep their secrets. As Assange languishes in London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison, in The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and Wikileaks’ Fight for Freedom, Andrew documents how a computer hacker with a turbulent childhood became a journalist and America’s Public Enemy No 1, facing up to 175 years in prison for revealing the truth about the business of Government.
Chaired by Rebecca Huntley
Misogyny is the “law enforcement arm of patriarchy” that polices and punishes “bad women” who threaten male dominance, argues philosopher Kate Manne in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women then outlined the illegitimate sense of entitlement that enables men to grasp power and authority for themselves, and demand emotional and physical care from women. Described as “the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st Century”, Kate offers a radical new framework through which to understand misogyny.
Chaired by Clare Wright
Described by Noel Pearson as “the most outstanding Aboriginal leader of the contemporary era”, Lowitja O’Donoghue navigated an early life of loss, racism and servitude to become the first Chair of Australia’s best attempt to facilitate self-determination for its Indigenous peoples, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. She was a lead negotiator on the Native Title Act with Paul Keating, who later called her a “leader with an unfailing instinct for enlargement”. Stuart Rintoul’s impressive, authorised biography of this important Australian leader is informed by meticulous research and a strong personal relationship with his subject.
Chaired by Simone Tur
Five old friends on the cusp of middle age meet at their fifteen year Harvard reunion and wonder if they’re wasting or realising their potential. And then their erstwhile classmate, the President’s much despised son, turns up dead. With razor sharp wit and focus, the hugely enjoyable Life After Truth explores friendship, parenthood, success and fame, as it examines how we narrate the stories of our lives, and the gap between our inner selves and the persona we present to the world.
Chaired by Tali Lavi
Inaugurated by the passionate readers who comprise Adelaide’s MUD Literary Club – the only philanthropic organisation in the country exclusively supporting literature – the MUD Literary Prize has established an impressive pedigree over its short life. Founded in 2018 to celebrate a debut novel of literary fiction, past winners are Sarah Schmidt (See What I Have Done), Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe) and Sienna Brown (Master of My Fate).
Be the first to hear from the 2021 winner, Pip Williams, with her acclaimed bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words, which expertly weaves the origin story of the Oxford Dictionary, an exploration of the cultural value placed on words, and themes of women’s suffrage and equality into an immensely satisfying whole.
Chaired by David Sly
Poppy Nwosu’s quick-witted romantic comedies, Making Friends with Alice Dyson and Taking Down Evelyn Tait, romp through friendship and romance, with pitfalls cleared and life lessons learned along the way. Her delightfully quirky heroines ultimately embrace who they are – from little quirks like being captured viral-video-dancing with the school troublemaker, to grand passions like an obsession with music and tomato growing.
Join Poppy Nwosu as she talks about stories, romance, and the importance of embracing and valuing who you really are … even if that person is kind of weird.
Chaired by Kristy Fairlamb
In Katherine Tamiko Arguile’s beautifully melancholic The Things She Owned , a visit from her cousin leads Erika to make sense of her fraught relationship with her dead mother through a treasured collection of artefacts and memories. In Victoria Hannan’s Kokomo , Mina’s mother, Elaine, has secrets too, which draw Mina back home from London on an urgent mission as Elaine ventures out of the house for the first time since the death of her father twelve years ago. These impressive debuts are moving and insightful meditations on love, grief and the ties that bind.
Chaired by Kate Mildenhall
In a time of crisis what are the ways forward? What possibilities have been created by science, community and technology? A stellar line up of contemporary authors, including Sydney’s Deputy Lord Mayor Jess Scully (Glimpses of Utopia), James Bradley (The Ghost Species) and Sean Williams (Twinmaker) as they discuss visions of the future and imagine new realities.
R.A. Spratt is on the case with her dual detecting series The Peski Kids and Friday Barnes: Girl Detective! Avid fans can follow the clues and investigate the evidence when R.A. joins us to disclose the inner workings of Currawong super sleuths Joe, Fin, April Peski and their partner in crime Loretta. Not to be outdone, the great powers of observation and superior mind of intrepid girl detective Friday Barnes will also be revealed.
Drawing on his Greek heritage, Will Kostakis subverts the norm with the duology Monuments and Rebel Gods juxtaposing contemporary Sydney teenagers, with ancient gods and time slips. Hear Will reflect on his influences and ideas when writing this “page-turning adventure fiction peppered with humour, romance and high- stakes.” (Sydney Morning Herald)
Andrew Kwong’s quietly gripping memoir takes us deep into Maoist China and the stark human cost of the Great Leap Forward. With parents from the intellectual class, Andrew’s innocence, optimism and love of the Communist Party is undercut by the persecution his family suffers under Mao’s regime. One Bright Moon is a powerful account of resilience, family and starting anew, as, after years of struggle, Andrew makes a daring escape to ultimately become a doctor in Australia, from where he works to reunite his family.
Chaired by Gabrielle Chan
“Rape”, writes Christina Lamb, one of the world’s foremost war correspondents who has worked in war and combat zones for over thirty years, “is the cheapest weapon known to man.” In her latest harrowing and profoundly moving book, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: What War Does to Women, Christina documents the terrible crimes committed against women as an instrument of war. With its sensitive interviews with contemporary victims across many countries, and tenacious and empathetic reporting, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields writes women into the history of war.
Chaired by Laura Grenfell
Parwana Afghan Kitchen opened in Adelaide in 2009 with a vision to share Afghan cuisine and culture. It swiftly became a beloved part of the city, attracting national acclaim for its food and welcoming atmosphere. In Parwana: Recipes and Stories from an Afghan Kitchen, Durkhanai Ayubi tells of her family’s journey from Afghanistan to Adelaide. Her mother’s recipes are interwoven with vivid stories of a homeland of rich histories, generous hospitality, and the celebration of the ritual of preparing and sharing food.
Chaired by Collette Snowden
After writing her best-selling book, Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When The World Goes Dark, Julia Baird said she hoped it would prove useful to “a few people going through an ‘In the Case of Emergency, Smash Glass’ kind of moment.” And then 2020 happened, and the world went dark for everyone. Part memoir, part cultural commentary, this intimate and inspiring book exhorts us to “reach for those tiny moments of stillness” as we search for the light within.
Chaired by Nicole Abadee
Naoise Dolan and Jessie Tu were responsible for two of the most bracing, exciting debuts of 2020. Naoise’s Exciting Times and Jessie’s A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing are witty, bold accounts of the power dynamics of sex and relationships in the twenty-first century, with heroines that deadpan their way through relationships – transactional, erotic and romantic – as they navigate love, vulnerability and ambition and muster the courage to find their true selves.
Chaired by Jo Case
Debra Adelaide and Tegan Bennett Daylight have lived their lives immersed in books – as writers, editors, critics, teachers and, most importantly, as readers. In Debra’s The Innocent Reader: Reflections on Reading and Writing and Tegan’s The Details: On Love, Death and Reading, they reflect with candour and generosity on their love of reading, and the joy and fulfillment it offers them, exploring the deep emotional connection they have forged with the written word and the worlds it can contain.
Join Peter Goldsworthy for an hour of poetry reading, featuring a line-up of celebrated poets drawn from Writers’ Week guests and South Australia’s vast pool of poetic talent. Including Julie Janson, Jessie Tu, Nardi Simpson and Adelaide’s own legendary street poet, Geoff Goodfellow.
With her acclaimed BBC radio series just commissioned for a seventh series, broadcaster, author, stand up comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes is celebrated for taking those pillars of our cultural understanding, the Greek myths, and retelling them from the female perspective. Her novel, A Thousand Ships, centres Creusa’s experience of the Trojan War and in her most recent book, the eloquent and witty essay collection Pandora’s Jar, Natalie “gives voice to the women, girls and goddesses who, for so long, have been silent.”
Chaired by Tom Wright
In Andrew Pippos’ lively debut Lucky’s, his eponymous soldier stays in Sydney after World War II to forge a life amongst the Greek diaspora and the homey diners they establish on each corner, to which he adds with a string of initially successful franchises. The Coconut Children is an evocative coming of age story of a schoolgirl and a community, written in and about contemporary Cabramatta by the prodigiously talented 19 year-old Vivian Pham. These compelling, vibrant stories remind us how Australia is shaped and lifted by the waves of immigration that reach our shores.
Chaired by Lur Alghurabi
In Mirandi Riwoe’s award-winning Stone Sky Gold Mountain, we experience Australia’s Gold Rush through the eyes of Chinese immigrants Ying and Lai Yue as family circumstances force the two siblings to seek their fortune far from home. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing recounts Vietnam’s dark history of colonialism and war from the perspective of its people rather than its invaders. These illuminating and engaging novels provide new perspectives on familiar stories in ways as refreshing as they are important.
Chaired by Yves Rees
Across the COVID-plagued year that was 2020, many of the great South Australian authors featured at this year’s Writers’ Week had to pivot to online launches, with celebratory glasses raised only virtually and individually as their books began their journeys in the world. The Zoom launch was a useful substitute… but not quite the same.
To compensate in some small way, we invite you to celebrate the wonderful array of South Australian books that missed out on in-person launches in 2020, as we re-launch 8 great works from 8 fantastic local authors from this year’s Writers’ Week program.
From memoir, to debut novels, to sly satire, to magic realism, to investigative reporting and more – help give this diverse and compelling range of books their moment in the spotlight by joining us for (Re)launch: Live and Local! as we shake our fist at Covid and 2020 and celebrate great South Australian writing – in person!
How much work does a bestselling author need to do to promote their book? What do they wish they had known about promotion that they have learned along the way? What exactly is it that a bookseller does? And how can new writers forge a great relationship with their local, busy bookseller to aid in the promotion of their book?
Get behind the scenes and behind the counter with bestselling author Craig Silvey and Dymocks and Imprints booksellers Mandy Macky and Jason Lake.
Hosted by Georgia Richter
The Business of Being a Writer is presented in partnership with Fremantle Press.
Shortlisted for this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Kylie Maslen’s Show Me Where It Hurts explores the impact of chronic illness on the lives of sufferers, and is marked by its eloquence, candour and generosity. Drawing on her own life and illness, Kylie documents the experience of living with pain with humour and courage, detailing its impact across such areas as housing, dating and work, and building her readers’ understanding through pop cultural references ranging from Frida Kahlo to Sally Rooney to Sponge Bob Squarepants.
Chaired by Jane Howard
Sarah Krasnostein’s first book, The Trauma Cleaner, was a runaway bestseller and swept literary prizes nationally. Her new book is The Believer, an exploration of the power of belief. In it, she listens to the “human song of longing for the unattainable”, with each note in the song a story of unshakeable and often unfathomable faith. The stories are told to her by six extraordinary individuals – including Death Doulas, Ghostbusters, Creationists and survivors of domestic violence – individuals Sarah meets, follows, interrogates and seeks to understand in this profound and deeply compassionate book.
Chaired by Rebecca Huntley
The suburb looms large in the physical and imaginary landscape of this country, a loaded repository of hopes and aspirations. In his long anticipated memoir, Out of Copley Street: A Working Class Boyhood, Geoff Goodfellow deploys clear lucid prose to describe the South Australian suburbs that forged him. Christopher Raja was eleven when he settled in the Melbourne suburbs, a world away from the teeming streets of Kolkata from whence he came. He describes the culture shock and the life he built in Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story.
Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs
When is a manuscript ready to submit? Do you need an agent or should you go straight to the publisher? How to best present your work and choose the destination for submission? And how do you make yourself stand out in the pack?
Get insider tips from agents and publishers on preparing your manuscript for publication with agent and publicist Brendan Fredericks, publishers Michael Bollen (Wakefield Press) and Lex Hirst (Pantera Press), and author David Whish-Wilson.
Hosted by Georgia Richter
The Business of Being a Writer is presented in partnership with Fremantle Press.
What changes do we need to make in our lives to get the lives we want to live? Spurred by a sense of something lacking in their own lives, Rick Morton and Christine Jackman step out of their comfort zones to find out. In My Year of Living Vulnerably, Rick Morton describes his journey into love after a diagnosis of Complex PTSD. Despite its outward trappings of success, Christine Jackman’s life felt off kilter and unrewarding. She recounts her efforts to reclaim peace in Turning Down the Noise: The Quiet Power of Silence in a Busy World.
Chaired by Natasha Cica