Following the success of their The New Yorker series last year, the festival will delight anglophiles this year with their focus on London Review of Books, a mini-program dedicated to the acclaimed literary magazine, London Review of Books (LRB). The sessions will include talks with LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, publisher Nicholas Spice, and regular contributors to the magazine.
As always, Melbourne Writers Festival will have a mini-program dedicated to Australian literature and culture. Guests this year include penciller, writer and artists Shaun Tan (The Red Tree, The Arrival), acclaimed pianist and writer Anna Goldworthy (Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life), Miles Franklin Award-winner Alex Miller (The Ancestor Game, Journey to the Stone Country), and witty, gay sensation Benjamin Law, who will be hosting a Queer Literary Salon dedicated to illustrating the queer voices within literature.
If that doesn’t tickle your fancy and provocative debate does, feel free to check out the Big Ideas forum series; Anne Summers will debate about the misogyny that still pervades politics today in Feminism, Misogyny, Power, while retired-politician Bob Brown will discuss the global green movement in From Grassroots to Global Activism. Building from this will be the Journalism part of the MWF program, a section dedicated to dissection of the journalism industry and its future.
New News, a forum series dedicated to issues currently affecting journalism, will delve into whether technology is driving us into another Dark Age with Is New Media Making Us Stupid? and how journalists cope with redundancy and fulfil their vocation in After The Package. Blog editor Sarah Wendell (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) will join Jane Caro and publisher Marina Go to discuss Digital Women, and how they affect the digital environment.
As part of the storytelling series, Magda Szunbanski will join Ophira Eisenberg to host The Moth, a theatrical production of storytelling centred around the motif of courage.
Most excitingly, Melbourne Writers Festival will host the last part of the Edinburgh World Writers Conference, a global conference that has traveled from Edinburgh to Istanbul to Berlin to Beijing and many more, spreading ideas and writing advice. It will host acclaimed Scottish writers, including Kirsty Gunn (Rain, The Boy and the Sea), Doug Johnstone (Smokeheads), and award-winning poet and writer, John Burnside.
