Adelaide Writers' Week

Chair: Gareth Evans

The personal and the political are intertwined in the memoir a Palestinian human rights lawyer writes about his father. This is a son’s story of a distant father forever enraged and galvanised by a litany of injustices - British colonial rule, the Nakba, Jordanian territorial ambitions and the many years of the Occupation. Aziz Shehadeh, an eminent jurist, was exiled, imprisoned and finally murdered by a collaborator. His son, Raja Shehadeh, shares his sorrow, his sense of alienation and his profound loss.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 3:45pm on the North Stage

Chair: Randa Abdel-Fattah

It is inevitable that First Nations and Palestinian writers would share a deep sense of displacement and the loss of homelands, language and heritage. How does the experience of stolen lands mark their writing? How does that loss express itself through the forms of poetry, fiction or nonfiction? Randa Abdel-Fattah explores these questions with Ramzy Baroud, Saree Makdisi and Amy McQuire.

Supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage

Chair: Tom Wright

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian-American writer, political activist and author. In her latest award-winning novel, Against the Loveless World, she chronicles the Palestinian struggle, the experience of statelessness and the spirit of resistance. Samah Sabawi is an award-winning playwright and activist whose work is a similarly powerful reckoning with a personal and political history of violent occupation, displacement and identity in the diaspora.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 1:15pm on the North Stage

Chair: Sara Saleh

Writing poetry in exile gives new meaning to what John Keats referred to as the poet’s “negative capability“ and their power to exist in uncertainties. How does one write from and about absence? Are the caesuras and repetitions of poetry uniquely suited to the subject of dispossession? Join Mohammed El-Kurd, Julia Cimafiejeva, Jeanine Leane and Hasib Hourani as they reflect on the power of poetry during uncertain times.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 12:00pm on the North Stage

Chair: Jumana Bayeh

Susan Abulhawa, Micaela Sahhar and Saree Makdisi together with Jumana Bayeh explore the power of literature to reimagine what has been distorted in the real world. Nowhere is this distortion more apparent than in relation to Palestine. Can literature reveal what has been suppressed to narrate the history of dispossession endured by generations of Palestinians? More radically, can literature envision and narrate an alternative world that does not yet exist?

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage

Chair: Catriona Menzies-Pike

It was Goethe who declared "call the dog, he is a reviewer". Reviewers are almost universally pilloried as partisan, ill-informed mediocrities fuelled by malice. What leads to this perception and why are they so reviled? We consider the state of Australia’s reviewing culture and the impact of backscratching and sycophancy on its present condition. The editor of the Sydney Review of Books, Catriona Menzies-Pike, is joined by Melinda Harvey, Jeanine Leane, Caroline Overington and Beejay Silcox.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 5:00pm on the West Stage

Chair: Beejay Silcox

Chloe Hooper’s Bedtime Story is a paean to the solace of reading in times of grief and pain. Its starting point is her partner’s leukemia diagnosis and the challenge of preparing their children for an uncertain future. In conversation with writer and critic Beejay Silcox, Hooper examines the world of children’s literature – a genre that is remarkably dark – and explores how children understand and cope with a world they can’t control.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 3:45pm on the West Stage

Chair: John Carty

Writer and artist Kim Mahood describes her new book, Wandering with Intent, as “the writer equivalent of hunting and gathering… a product of wandering among the contradictions of the cross-cultural world I have chosen to inhabit.“ As Australia embarks on a discussion about enshrining an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution, Mahood invites us into a generous and open-hearted dialogue.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 2:30pm on the West Stage

Chair: Rick Morton

In an interview with The Guardian, author Craig Silvey admitted his favourite object is a mandolin – absolutely not to be confused with his passion for the ukulele – and expressed his regret over the lost breakthrough memoir he wrote at the age of 10. With Rick Morton, Silvey explains a writing career that includes a fascination with small Australian towns, the acts of courage that inspire him and why empathy matters.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 1:15pm on the West Stage

Chair: Sarah Kanowski

In an era of waning liberal utopianism, decreasing faith in the myth of economic progress and increasing social and psychological fragmentation, the epithet ’loser’ has acquired a newly powerful resonance. Josh Cohen discusses the experience of being a loser, its literary champions, from Thomas Bernhard to Franz Kafka, and the increasingly manic defences mobilised against this universal condition – from a swollen self-help industry to political demagoguery.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 12:00pm on the West Stage