Beginning as a one-day zine fair in 2004, the Emerging Writers Festival has expanded to ten days of events, workshops, panel discussions and gala nights, as well as digital events using the #ewf13 hashtag — and it all begins next week! I’m very excited to be a part of two events this year: hosting a masterclass [...]

The full Sydney Writers’ Festival program has just been released and new Director Jemma Birrell has curated a wonderful line up. As well as showcasing our incredible Australian writers and authors, I’m particularly excited about the international guests coming out — such as Diego Marani, Anis Mojgani, Naomi Wolf, James Wood, Karl Ove Knausgaard, even [...]

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year. When I walk into the launch of the Younger Young Writers’ Journal on the final night of NYWF, the young writers are covered in blue paint, faint blue marks smudged on their cheeks from journals recently printed, the ink not yet [...]

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year. It’s easy to doubt yourself when writing to Christian Lander. But it’s only after I send him my interview questions that I realise they’re written in Helvetica and that I’ve just potentially marked myself as hopelessly ‘white person’ too. Lander has [...]

This interview is cross-posted from NYWF where I’m one of the official bloggers this year. There’s a small link at the top of Bkclb’s Infinite Book project which directs to the Wikipedia entry on Borges’ The Book of Sand – a typically curious Borges tale about a book of all books that is ‘exactly infinite’: possessing [...]

I asked co-director Pip Smith a few questions about the program and what we can expect at this year’s festival.

At the end of September every year, Newcastle is besieged by writers and artists flocking to the city for four days of workshops, performances, panel discussions and the sort of drinking that usually happens when young creative types gather. This is Not Art is a national independent arts festival for emerging and experimental writers, performers [...]

Amongst all the many panel discussions, debates, and ‘in conversations’, the Melbourne Writers Festival is the site of launches for new and established literary magazines. MWF has hosted the Big Issue Fiction Edition, Seven Stories, Veranda and Above Water to name just a few. The closing night of MWF tomorrow will see the launch of the latest issue of Going Down [...]

Day Two The second day of the festival brought the New Yorker event I had been waiting for, The New Yorker: What’s the Story? This time set at BMW Edge, with a smaller cast from the magazine – editorial director Henry Finder, staff writer David Grann and music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. Though the Keynote may [...]

Writers festivals are my favourite time to be in any city. The streets are buzzing and there’s an excitement about discussions of writing, politics and ideas. I’ve been lucky enough to be travelling a little this year for writerly events. I’ve been to the Sydney Writers Festival, Varuna, and next month I’ll be in Newcastle for the National [...]

The Melbourne Writers Festival launches next week, and is Steve Grimwade’s last as festival Director. It has been an unusual time in the literary festival scene, with the Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Emerging Writers’ Festivals all changing Directors. Yesterday afternoon, Bookseller + Publisher announced that Lisa Dempster, outgoing Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival (EWF) [...]

Last night under the glass shards of the atrium at Federation Square the Melbourne Writers Festival program was officially launched. It’s Steve Grimwade’s final year as Festival Director and he delivered an enthusiastic outline of the events happening throughout the festival, which runs from 23 August to 2 September. There are several events I’m quite [...]

A girl sits on a crowded train reading aloud an explicit section from Nabokov’s Lolita: She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me [...]

Scribbled notes / Late nights / Early mornings / Lilting author signatures still fresh inside new novels / The mesmerising experience of prose read aloud by the author who penned it / Black coffee / Dead phone batteries / Lightbulb books hanging overhead / Sitting in the green room watching authors prepare for their sessions / The sunny sky [...]

Guest post by Lisa Dempster In November 2010 I landed in Sharjah – a place I had not known existed until two months earlier – and several hours later I was sitting in a grand reception hall watching its International Book Fair being opened by one Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohammed al Qassimi. The room [...]