Adelaide Writers' Week

With Georgina Godwin | Set over a year on a merino wool farm in Tasmania, Maggie MacKellar’s memoir is a meditation on motherhood, family and home. Life is not easy, as MacKellar explains to Georgina Godwin.

Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 10:45am

Bob Carr, James Curran, Amanda Hodge, Sam Roggeveen and Peter Varghese with Maxine McKew | The Australian Labor Party has embraced AUKUS, a security arrangement that handcuffs Australia to the US. Has the government made the right call? Join Bob Carr, James Curran, Amanda Hodge (live stream), Sam Roggeveen and Peter Varghese with Maxine McKew.

With Julia Baird | Internationally acclaimed novelist Richard Flanagan says: “writers are no more than dancing shoes sliding between the dance and the floor.” He discusses his latest book with Julia Baird.

This session is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Event details: Sat 02 Mar, 10:45am

With Beejay Silcox | Literary agent turned memoirist Jeanne Ryckmans’ new work is a devastating personal detective story. Ryckmans explains to Beejay Silcox how a con artist and fantasist can dupe an intelligent and worldly woman.

With Sarah L'Estrange | Robyn Davidson’s life and writing has been shaped by curiosity, restlessness and a desire to see the world. In conversation with Sarah L’Estrange, Davidson talks about why she returned to Australia.

Chair: Amanda Vanstone.

More than 50 years ago, Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food introduced the flavours of the Middle East to western readers. Long before Ottolenghi, she introduced homecooks around the world to the delights of cumin and coriander from Egypt, sumac and tamarind from Syria and Lebanon, pomegranates from Iran and harissa from Africa. Claudia Roden CBE talks about flavours and cooking at home with the Hon Amanda Vanstone AO, owner of over 500 cookbooks and a whiz with braised duck and turnips.

Event details: This conversation was not held live in front of an audience at Adelaide Writers' Week but was recorded separately.

Chair: Jo Case

A six-year-old child disappears in a dust storm in the Flinders Ranges. It’s a familiar literary trope about lost white children and reflects the anxiety in 19th century colonial Australia about the dangers of the wilderness. The same anxiety, unsurprisingly, did not accompany the Stolen Generations, forever lost to their families and cultures. In her latest novel of competing parallel narratives, The Sun Walks Down, Fiona McFarlane explores who belongs to the land and who are the interlopers.

Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage

Chair: Katrina Strickland

Wendy Whiteley has long been responsible for Brett Whiteley’s legacy, but she is also an artist in her own right and an important figure in the Australian art world. How does the role of ’keeper of the flame’ impact on the inheritor of that task? Should we separate Brett Whiteley and his behavior from his art? Ashleigh Wilson talks about his year-long conversation with Wendy Whiteley and what he discovered about one of our most iconic ’brothers of the brush’.

Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage

Chair: Bob Carr

Louis Menand, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Metaphysical Club, tells the story of America after the Second World War in his latest book, The Free World. With references to luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, Elvis Presley, Susan Sontag and James Baldwin, Menand explores the significant cultural figures of the Cold War period, when “ideas mattered, painting mattered, movies mattered, poetry mattered".

Supported by the Consulate of the United States.

Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 2:30pm

Chair: Jonathan Green

In both the bestselling novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and its recently published sequel, All the Broken Places, John Boyne has taken on the difficult terrain of fictionalising the Holocaust. But how should novelists write about this period? Does historical accuracy matter? Are these contemporary novels written to stir our collective conscience or to remind us of the moral choices individuals make in dangerous times? Join us as Boyne reflects on these issues in the context of his novels for adults and younger readers.

Event details: Thu 09 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage