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.”
The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner details a life where, at every turn, there is failure of institutions — a school that ignored ongoing reports of a teacher’s misconduct, a media landscape that values clicks more than truth, a legal system that doesn’t fully recognise the severity and long-term impacts of grooming on survivors, and indeed the Australian government itself, who threw Tame into the national spotlight with minimal support.
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.
Zevin stressed to the audience that the best thing you can do for yourself is to get more comfortable in the creative place that is failure: “To be hopeful or positive in this world, at least for me, takes great intellectual effort.”
"In the modern era, many people have come up with hare-brained ideas about how to change the world around us, and more recently, to 'settle’ new planets. I don’t know if that’s viable. But I think it’s the stuff of science fiction, rather than reality."