Chair: Rick Morton

Shannon Burns’ haunting memoir, Childhood, details the poverty, neglect and domestic dysfunction the author faced while growing up in suburban South Australia. Moving between first and third person perspectives, the memoir provides a window into the series of traumatic familial relationships that contributed to his turbulent childhood. Burns reflects on his experiences, what it means to ’make it out’ and the hope that can be found in literature.

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

Chair: Monica Attard

Bill Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, has been the largest foreign investor in Russia since 2005. This has given him a unique insight into how Russia works. His conclusion in his new book, Freezing Order, is that Russia is riddled with corruption and human rights abuses and that its exercise of influence in elections overseas is deeply troubling. Browder explains why he has spent the last few years advocating for countries to adopt the Magnitsky Act.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 9:30am on the West Stage

Chair: Felicity Plunkett

In her 1970 book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett described Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a “quasi-religious tract" worshipping at the altar of the penis. Critical responses have since become more nuanced. Novelist Alison MacLeod and cultural critics Amit Chaudhuri, Geoff Dyer and Lara Feigel discuss a writer whose subject – sex and bodies – suddenly seems profoundly modern.

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

Chair: Bob Carr

The 20th century was deemed 'The American Century’. In more recent times, that title has been challenged by the might and power of China. Experts describe the new world order as multipolar. As America has turned inwards and its exceptionalism engendered skepticism, what are the ramifications? Is a world where spheres of influence are more balanced good for nation states, for their citizens and for collective international action? The Hon Bob Carr tests these propositions with Shalom Auslander, James Curran, John Keane and Fintan O’Toole.

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

Chair: Katrina Strickland

Gender dynamics in the 21st century can be befuddling. Through fiction and non-fiction alike, three renowned authors explore the humour, pathos, heartbreak and the challenges of human connection in the modern city. Sloane Crosley, author of Cult Classic, Laura Kipnis, author of Love in the Time of Contagion, and Diana Reid, author of Seeing Other People, are keen observers of contemporary etiquette and the morality of modern personal relationships. They share their observations with Katrina Strickland.

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

Chair: Nicci Gerrard

Growing up Catholic on the outskirts of 1970s Belfast, Louise Kennedy’s earliest memories are marked by violence: flying glass lacerating her grandmother when a bomb went off during the Troubles. Her novel, Trespasses, is a love story set against a backdrop of escalating violence. It won the award for Novel of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards and has been hailed as a brilliant and devastating debut.

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

Chair: Paul Daley

Too young to shave and still wearing short pants, boys as young as 13 lined up and lied about their age to volunteer in the Second World War. These boys must have forgotten the horrors their fathers and grandfathers endured in the First World War or not understood their true impact. Paul Byrnes shares some of these tragic and deeply moving personal stories with Paul Daley, a journalist and author with an abiding interest in history and national identity.

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

Chair: Felicity Plunkett

British Poet Laureate Simon Armitage is also a playwright, a novelist, a screenwriter and a musician. While he has turned his hand to many art forms, he recognises the continued need for poetry: “It seems to me that, in this age of over-information, poetry is more important than ever, because it refuses to be garrulous and to join in with the constant diarrhoea of information. It is resolutely compact.“ Join us as Armitage looks back on his life and work.

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

Chair: Jon Faine

How should we judge Australia’s response to the pandemic? We were quick to declare a pandemic, to close our borders, to grow COVID in a lab. But we could also have done better – the pandemic divided the federation and our government failed to protect the elderly or the young. Our COVID report card is mixed. Join The Age’s Chief Political Reporter, Chip Le Grand, and renowned epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre for a fascinating conversation.

Event details: Tue 07 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage

Full title: State-Sponsored Greenwash: Offsetting Us Up to Fail

Chair: Paul Barclay

Brought to you by The Australia Institute in partnership with Adelaide Writers’ Week

While Australia has signed up to ’net zero emissions’ by 2050, governments and industry are still pursuing an agenda of fossil fuel expansion. Clever accounting, dodgy offsets and technocratic fantasies like carbon capture and storage continue to be used to conceal the fundamental contradiction between plans to increase gas and coal production and promises to tackle climate change. This session exposes Australia’s greenwash and regulatory capture – the critical first step to robust climate policy.

Event details: Mon 06 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage