Check your schedule and pack the car – Clunes Booktown Festival is back for Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 May 2018 and has covered all of your literary needs. Just like the past 11 years, CBF will overwhelm Clunes’ main street with bookstores, local food and wine, street performers, and a wave of bibliophiles.
Clunes is one of the fortunate few towns across the globe – the only one nationwide – that is dubbed a ‘Booktown’; a small, regional. community-focused town with a concentration of booksellers. With that as a feat in itself, the CBF volunteers, alongside Clunes’ population of less than two-thousand people, are putting on quite a show.
The guest lineup of authors is as dense and engaging as a Russian epic; Richard Flanagan, Eddie Ayres, Jaclyn Moriarty, Josephine Wilson and Emma Viskic are only a taste of the names adding to this year’s CBF. Guest authors will engage in panel discussions touching on a range of literary and social topics, and many Q&As will give you the chance to pick your favourite writers’ brains.
In addition to the forest of books on show and for sale, Clunes, as a self-respecting Victorian country town, is polishing up their many heritage-listed buildings and inviting guests to explore the numerous exhibitions that will be on display. You can dip into the town’s history with a historical walking tour offered multiple times each day. Alternatively, if you’re more adrenaline-inclined, you can sign yourself up for a ghost tour departing at 7.15pm and returning late; just make sure you have your wits about you.
