FWF expands to two festivals in 2018

The Feminist Writers Festival (FWF) has announced it will expand to two festivals in 2018, with the theme ‘rewriting the story’.

FWF will run its first New South Wales festival in late October, to be based in Sydney, with a selection of regional NSW events also planned. The Victorian festival will include events in Melbourne, Geelong and Ballarat, and will take place from 24-27 May.

FWF co-chair and board member Nikki Anderson says that a key focus of the expanded festival is ‘skilling up women and non-binary writers for their own writing and getting connected with other feminist readers and writers’, while also trying to ‘go beyond the one-hour panel’, with a mix of longer, more discursive panels and practical workshops.

Anderson says that the 2018 festival theme was chosen to ‘tap into that zeitgeist of #MeToo and the Silence Breakers, but it also stems from the deeper desire for structural change—how do you create change that is sustainable and longstanding and looks at the underlying systems?’

The 2018 FWF program for Victoria will be announced at an event on 7 March (International Women’s Day eve), alongside a panel discussion featuring writers Roj Amedi, Jane Gilmore and Leena van Deventer.

As previously reported by Books+Publishing, FWF received $45,000 in funding from the Victorian Government in October 2017 to stage its second festival in 2018. The inaugural festival—established to ‘promote feminist literature within the wider Australian community’—was held in August 2016 during the Melbourne Writers Festival.

For more information, see the FWF website.

Category: Festivals Local news