I would like to begin this review with a conclusion. Put simply, Eleanor Catton’s Sydney Writers’ Festival talk left me with one resounding reflection: conversation is so essential to the way we tell and consume stories. Both privately and collectively, the conversations that the event facilitated affirmed the importance of in-person events, and the intimacy…
While their experiences differ, their stories of bravery, courage, grief, loss, resilience, and hope bring them together. It was noted, too, that the end of the Holocaust didn’t mark the end of survivors’ troubles, grief, and loss.
As I sat down for the Sydney Writers’ Festival Great Adaptations panel, I heard from writers from all walks of the world — Australia, New Zealand, and England/Sweden — gathered together to discuss the turbulent journey of bringing novels to the big and small screen. Attending this panel of authors, in conversation with Benjamin Law…
Speaking about her new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this past weekend with Jess Scully, Jenny Odell reframes our modern lingua franca for time.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida can be, as described by some audience members at the SWF panel, a tad tricky to get into, but once you’ve established a connection with the protagonist and his story, it’s even trickier to put the book down.
To grapple with the perennial question of the future is an onerous task on a good day. In a world plagued by climate change, enduring coloniality, racism, a regression of women’s rights and the rise of nationalism, this query only becomes all the more daunting. Try making the discourse comedic, and you are venturing into shaky territory.
It is in this constant back-and-forth between structural inequality and personal resistance which Evaristo locates her personal voice, rippling like a moonlit breeze through the eclipsed amphitheatre.
"People just have to expect that students will sometimes have ‘way out’ views, but those views may ultimately become tomorrow’s orthodoxy, and students have to speak up and have to be involved.”
Tame writes of a life shaped by trauma, but by no means a life defined by it. Instead, a message of love, humour and connection — coexisting with, and overwhelming, the ongoing impacts of child sexual abuse and grooming — emerges.
Grant and I spoke about Country — the notion of a place which transcends something as simple as geography. It is who we are, it is everything that we are.