Sydney Writers' Festival

By Sydney Writers' Festival

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#SydneyWritersFestival is Australia's largest celebration of literature, stories and ideas. Every year, we bring together the world's best authors, leading public intellectuals, scientists, journalists and more.

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Daniel Mendelsohn: The Bad ...

12.18.2020

A master of popular criticism, The New York Times have christened Daniel Mendelsohn “our most irresistible literary critic”. In The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones, Daniel uses the ancient past as a lens ...

Sydney Writers' Festival episodes:

12.18.2020 Daniel Mendelsohn: The Bad Boy of Athens A master of popular criticism, The New York Times have christened Daniel Mendelsohn “our most irresistible literary critic”. In The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones, Daniel uses the ancient past as a lens ...
12.09.2020 Charlotte Wood: The Weekend Charlotte Wood has captured the feminist zeitgeist once again with The Weekend, her sharply observed and excruciatingly funny follow-up to the Stella Prize–winning The Natural Way of Things. When three lifelong friends in their 70s meet at a beach house ...
12.02.2020 Julia Phillips: Disappearing Earth One of the most talked-about books of the year, Julia Phillips’s powerful debut thriller Disappearing Earth has been hailed as “daring, nearly flawless” (The New York Times Book Review). When two sisters disappear from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka ...
11.24.2020 Tony Birch: The White Girl In The White Girl, Miles Franklin Award-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on 1960s Australia and the then-government’s devastating policy of taking Indigenous children from their families. Set in a fictional Australian town at the tail end of the ...
11.16.2020 Helen Garner: Guardian Australia Book Club In this special Sydney Writers' Festival edition of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club, Helen Garner discusses the second volume of her diaries, One Day I’ll Remember This, which tracks a particularly tumultuous decade of her life: it begins with a ...
11.10.2020 Behrouz Boochani and Tara June Winch in Conversation As part of Cheltenham Literature Festival, Sydney Writers' Festival co-presented a special conversation between Wiradjuri author Tara June Winch (The Yield) and Kurdish film-maker, writer and refugee Behrouz Boochani (No Friend but the Mountains). Now released as a podcast, the ...
11.03.2020 Trent Dalton: All Our Shimmering Skies Trent Dalton's novel, All Our Shimmering Skies, is an exhilarating tale of love, friendship and gifts that fall from the sky. Set in the Northern Territory during World War II, it’s filled with Trent’s typically acute observations, larger-than-life characters and ...
10.28.2020 Griffith Review 68: Getting On Step behind the clichés about silver tsunamis to explore the power and politics, lives and loves, losses and salvations that define who we are and how we live as we get older. Griffith Review’s Getting On explores the themes of ...
10.23.2020 Secrets and Lies: Donor-Conceived Rights For some, DNA testing is a harmless foray into their family’s past. But for others, it can be life-changing. The increase in popularity of DNA testing means thousands of people all over the world are unearthing long-held secrets, opening up ...
10.21.2020 Drawn from Life: Alice Oseman in Conversation First published when she was a teenager, Alice Oseman has grown up alongside her readers. With an extraordinary seven books now under her belt, her heartfelt stories of fandoms, friendship and love continue to obsess and delight the YA world. ...
10.14.2020 Mirandi Riwoe: Stone Sky Gold Mountain In Stone Sky Gold Mountain Mirandi Riwoe evokes the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life 150 years ago in the township of Maytown, Far North Queensland. Displaced siblings Ying and Lai Yue, forced to flee their home in China, soon ...
10.07.2020 Favel Parret: There Was Still Love There Was Still Love, the profoundly moving new novel from Miles Franklin Award–shortlisted author Favel Parrett, follows twin sisters separated at 15 by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and kept apart by the Cold War. Tender and beautifully told, the ...
10.06.2020 Alex Dyson: When it Drops ARIA award-winning triple j host Alex Dyson talks to fellow YA author Will Kostakis about his debut YA novel, When it Drops. Sixteen-year-old Caleb is a socially awkward outcast dealing with the death of his father by secretly making music ...
09.30.2020 Heather Rose: Bruny Part political thriller, part family saga and part love letter to Tasmania, Bruny is the most ambitious novel yet from the Stella Prize– and Christina Stead Prize–winning author of The Museum of Modern Love. Opening with an explosive terrorist act, ...
09.23.2020 Nicole Dennis-Benn: Patsy From the award-winning novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, Patsy is the brave and stirring saga of a Jamaican woman who upends her life for a new start in America, leaving her young child behind. Fellow author Alexander Chee calls Pasty a “stunningly ...
09.17.2020 Queerly Beloved From summer flings and first crushes to slow-burning romances – these three authors know what it takes to write a nuanced queer love story. Sophie Gonzales (Only Mostly Devastated) and Anna Whateley (Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal) have written warm, funny ...
09.14.2020 Josephine Rowe: Here Until August A masterful collection of horizons, departures, heartbreaks and seductions by one of Australia’s short-fiction greats, Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August spans Montreal and Western Australia. It follows the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are travelling beyond ...
09.10.2020 Text on the Beach From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s a long tradition of writing about eventful summers where personal crises unfold across long days and languid nights. Ronnie Scott’s The Adversary is a summer ...
09.09.2020 Antony Loewenstein: Pills, Powder, and Smoke An exposé by Disaster Capitalism author Antony Loewenstein, Pills, Powder, and Smoke traverses the streets of London, the killing fields of Central America and the cocaine routes of West Africa to uncover a failed policy and ask who it really ...
09.01.2020 Vicki Laveau-Harvie: The Erratics In Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s Stella Prize-winning memoir The Erratics, two sisters reckon with the convalescence and death of their outlandishly tyrannical mother and the care of their psychologically terrorised father. Darkly comic and savagely honest, The Erratics possesses the tightly coiled, ...
08.27.2020 Reckoning and Retribution Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena and Ellena Savage’s Blueberries interrogate what it means to make one’s way through the world as a woman, within its structures of power and oppression. Lucia's powerful memoir explores how trauma affects the body, bringing ...
08.24.2020 Anna Wiener: Uncanny Valley Uncanny Valley is Anna Wiener’s prescient, page-turning account of our digital age. Set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush, Anna retells her days in San Francisco’s 2010s Silicon Valley culture, which Rebecca Solnit describes as “like ...
08.19.2020 First on the Ground Mainstream media has long been guilty of not giving enough exposure to Indigenous stories and failing to prioritise the voices of Indigenous reporters. In this podcast from the Stories Worth Telling series, hear from a panel of leading journalists as ...
08.18.2020 Jeff Sparrow: Fascists Among Us Fascists Among Us by Walkley Award–winning writer Jeff Sparrow is the first book to trace the Christchurch massacre’s roots. Jeff untangles the history of the far right to show how fascists have adapted to 21st-century politics, and argues that the ...
08.12.2020 Long-Form Journalism in Australia As part of the Stories Worth Telling series, two of Australia’s most beloved and acclaimed magazine writers, The Australian’s Trent Dalton and Good Weekend’s Jane Cadzow, join editor Katrina Strickland to discuss the history and continued relevance of the form. ...
08.11.2020 Bart van Es: The Cut Out Girl Winner of the 2018 Costa Book of the Year Award, The Cut Out Girl is the extraordinary true story of Lien de Jong, a young Jewish girl who became one of Holland’s hidden children of World War II. While her ...
08.05.2020 The Art of the Story In the digital era where "snackable" content reigns supreme, some stories still require time and space. As part of the Stories Worth Telling series, join long-time contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic George Packer and award-winning author Don ...
08.03.2020 Sophie McNeill: We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know For more than 15 years, Walkley Award–winning journalist Sophie McNeill has reported on some of the most war-ravaged and oppressive places on earth, including Syria, Gaza and Iraq. Her memoir, We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know tells the human stories ...
07.29.2020 Tanya Talaga: All Our Relations From Canada and Brazil to Norway and Australia, the Indigenous experience in colonised nations holds startling – and deeply disturbing – similarities. The bestselling and award-winning All Our Relations: Indigenous trauma in the shadow of colonialism, by Anishinaabe and Polish ...
07.27.2020 Remembering Christchurch On Friday 15 March 2019, an Australian-born white supremacist entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and massacred 51 Muslims peacefully conducting their sacred Friday prayers. One year after the Christchurch attacks, Muslim writers in Australia and around the world ...
07.25.2020 Animals Like Us Jo Lennan and Laura Jean McKay have written two brilliant, wholly original books that examine humanity and animality as a wave of extinctions gathers force. They are joined by the Wheeler Centre’s Veronica Sullivan to discuss how their work invites ...
07.22.2020 David Mitchell: Utopia Avenue Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, David Mitchell is beloved by millions of readers around the world for his spectacular, visionary books including Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks and number9dream. In conversation with Michael Williams, David discusses his enthralling new ...
07.16.2020 Layla F. Saad: Me and White Supremacy In 2018, Layla F. Saad ran a 28-day Instagram challenge under the hashtag #MeAndWhiteSupremacy, designed to encourage those with white privilege to unflinchingly examine their complicity in upholding an oppressive power system. The challenge catalysed an awakening for thousands and ...
07.15.2020 Julia Gillard: Women and Leadership Women and Leadership, co-authored by Julia Gillard and acclaimed development economist Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, combines research with interviews with some of the world’s extraordinary women leaders. It examines the influence of gender on women’s access to positions of leadership, the ...
07.14.2020 Flocks and Fakes The dark arts of online deception run the gamut from love rats and confidence tricksters to dedicated political disinformation campaigns. Hear memoirist Stephanie Wood (Fake) and Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev (This is Not Propaganda) in conversation with Rebecca Giggs. ...
07.08.2020 Remembering Clive James Clive James died in November 2019, leaving behind an unrivalled legacy of books, poetry, prose, essays and memoirs, as well as golden moments of television broadcasts and cultural criticism that showcased his gift for the knockout aphorism. Join a panel ...
07.06.2020 Golriz Ghahraman: Know Your Place Golriz Ghahraman’s memoir Know Your Place tells her powerful story of becoming the first refugee elected to New Zealand’s parliament. Since her election, the former UN lawyer and Iranian-Kiwi asylum seeker has received a barrage of hate that intensified after ...
07.01.2020 Lisa Taddeo: Three Women Based on almost a decade of immersive research, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a bestselling work of narrative non-fiction that traces the private lives of three ordinary American women. Its many fans include Elizabeth Gilbert, who called it “a non-fiction ...
06.29.2020 Kawai Strong Washburn: Sharks in the Time of Saviours Delicately balancing Hawaiian myth and the broken American dream, Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviours has been hailed by novelist Marlon James as a “ferocious debut” in which “old myths clash with new realities, love is in ...
06.24.2020 Paul Kelly: Love is Strong as Death Writer Tony Birch talks with singer, songwriter and national treasure Paul Kelly about his new collection, Love is Strong as Death: Poems chosen by Paul Kelly. Featuring more than 300 works from a range of ancient and modern authors, the ...
06.22.2020 Kathy Lette Gets Candid Since writing Puberty Blues as a teenager, Kathy Lette has seen her definitive story of Australian teenagers navigating the chaos of life adapted into a cult movie and a major television series. Kathy has gone on to pen 11 global ...
06.17.2020 Writing on a Knife's Edge In a session dedicated to the craft of genre writing, two experts join ABC Radio’s Rhianna Patrick to uncover what it really takes to deliver a tightly plotted narrative. Sarah Epstein (Deep Water) and Astrid Scholte (The Vanishing Deep) have ...
06.17.2020 Chris Hammer: Silver A leader in Australian noir, bestselling Scrublands author Chris Hammer is the winner of the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award. In Silver, flawed protagonist Martin Scarsden returns to his hometown to discover his former school friend ...
06.15.2020 Vivian Pham: The Coconut Children A vivid picture of Cabramatta, The Coconut Children is a powerful ode to modern Australia by debut novelist Vivian Pham. It has elicited praise from the likes of Dave Eggers, who hailed it as a “deeply felt and intimate coming-of-age ...
06.11.2020 Bob Brown: Planet Earth Bob Brown led the Australian Greens from the party's foundation in 1992 until April 2012. Bob was elected to the Australian Senate in 1996. He was also the first openly gay member of the Parliament of Australia, and the first ...
06.09.2020 Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel A masterful work of emotional force from one of the greatest, most daring contemporary writers, Strange Hotel is the blistering new novel from Eimear McBride, the Women’s Prize for Fiction–winning author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. The story ...
06.03.2020 Kay Kerr: Please Don't Hug Me Kay Kerr’s debut young adult novel, Please Don’t Hug Me, explores love, loss and friendship through the eyes of Erin, a young woman on the autism spectrum. Kay joins Anna Whateley, a fellow neurodivergent author, for a funny, warm and ...
06.03.2020 Cassandra Pybus: Truganini Truganini tells the haunting story of the extraordinary woman behind the myth of ‘the last Aboriginal Tasmanian’. Scholar and award-winning author Cassandra Pybus draws from original eyewitness accounts to paint a complex picture of Truganini’s remarkable life. In conversation with ...
06.01.2020 James Bradley: Ghost Species An exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma, Ghost Species is the latest novel by prize-winning author and critic James Bradley. When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer ...
05.27.2020 Philippe Sands: The Ratline The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive is the exhilarating follow-up to the bestselling East West Street from Philippe Sands, who sets out to uncover what happened to Nazi fugitive Otto von Wächter. Philippe ...

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