Adelaide Writers’ Week announces 2024 program
Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW) has announced its 2024 program, running from 2 to 7 March.
Held in Adelaide’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, the week features 194 writers across 135 sessions, under the theme ‘The past is not another country’.
Among international guests are Irish Laureate for Fiction Anne Enright, literary author Édouard Louis, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Thomas L Friedman (via livestream), economist Yanis Varoufakis, journalist Alastair Campbell, academic Mary Beard, historian Ilan Pappé, Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley, and writers Anjali Joseph, Nilanjana Roy, Perumal Murugan, Meena Kandasamy, and Anjum Hasan, who will appear in sessions spotlighting writers from South Asia.
Among local guests are Evelyn Araluen, Mark Brandi, Trent Dalton, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Richard Flanagan, Anna Funder, Richard Glover, Peter Goldsworthy, Kate Grenville, Gail Jones, Thomas Keneally, Nam Le, Melissa Lucashenko, David Marr, Jazz Money, Omar Sakr, Leigh Sales, Tracey Spicer, Jessica Townsend, Christos Tsiolkas, Ellen van Neerven, Pip Williams, Charlotte Wood, Alexis Wright and Karen Wyld. Guests also include several historians, including Julian Jackson, Peter Frankopan and Avi Shlaim.
In her second year as AWW director, Louise Adler said: ‘Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2024 will offer readers illuminating, inspiring and intriguing conversations about the process of writing and the ideas that have kept writers at their desks over the past year.’
Events in Adelaide Town Hall include ‘The Grande Dames of Letters’ with Mary Beard, Anne Michaels, Jane Smiley and Elizabeth Strout, hosted by Julia Baird; and ‘The Rest Is Politics’ with facilitator Sarah Ferguson in a discussion between Alistair Campbell onstage and Rory Stewart (via livestream). Elsewhere, ‘Family Circus’ will be co-hosted by Sarah Kanowski and Richard Fidler, and will feature the authors Martin Flanagan, Wendy Harmer, Thomas Keneally, Lisa Millar and Christos Tsiolkas, who will share snapshots from their family stories.
The ‘Breakfast with Papers’ series will be hosted by Guardian journalist Tory Shepherd and Radio National journalist Jonathan Green. Australia Institute executive director Richard Denniss and the institute team will run a ‘series of provocative, courageous, and unmissable discussions’. David Speers will host an Insiders panel to dissect the week in politics.
There will also be a young readers’ program, featuring picture book, graphic novel and middle-grade series authors, including Jessica Townsend. YA Night will include authors Lynette Noni and Gary Lonesborough, and will feature the competition for International High School Poetry Champion between poets from Australia, the US and South Korea.
AWW will also include the announcement of the Stella Prize longlist on 4 March.
Pictured: Louise Adler, credit: Kristoffer Paulsen.
Category: Local news
