Adelaide Writers' Week

Chair: Clare Sawyer

Enter a world of adventure where the stakes are high and danger lies around every treacherous corner, a place where a mystery illness is making people speak ancient languages and bake old-fashioned cakes. This is the world of Trilby Moffat and it’s up to her to turn the tide, fighting time and an evil adversary with a bureaucratic bent. Thank goodness there’s cake! Join author Kate Temple as she reveals the secrets behind this dangerous world.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 1:00pm in the Torrens Tent

Chair: Clare Sawyer

Cop & Robber is the new nail-biter from Tristan Bancks, the bestselling author of Two Wolves, The Fall and Detention. Nash Hall’s dad is a criminal who just can’t seem to go straight. He wants Nash to help him commit a robbery. A big one. The trouble is, Nash’s mum is a cop. And the robbery is at Nash’s school. But Dad owes a lot of money to some very dangerous people and if Nash doesn’t help him do the job, it could cost both their lives. Meet author Tristan Bancks as he gives the lowdown on how he came up with this novel story idea.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12:00pm in the Torrens Tent

Chair: Clare Sawyer

Romance is a popular genre in Australian YA fiction, reflecting the age that the characters first begin to express their love and sexuality. There are added layers of complexity for characters from non-Western cultures, as they balance the usual growing pains of adolescence and young romance with a sense of being different from the dominant culture. Join authors Sarah Ayoub and Randa Abdel-Fattah as they discuss realistic characters, romantic tropes, feelings of being ’Other’ and the importance of self-love.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 11:00am in the Torrens Tent

Acclaimed author Sean Williams makes a stopover in his hometown of Adelaide between visits to Ireland and Antarctica to talk about his most recent books, Honour Among Ghosts and Her Perilous Mansion. How do all these things connect? Let two Shadow Judges from the Children’s Book Council of Australia (SA Branch), Lally E and Evie M, be your guides as we explore the remarkable mind behind these suspenseful middle-grade fantasies full of mystery, twists and skulduggery.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:00am in the Torrens Tent

Host: DEFNE / Poets include Isi Ferguson, Anna McGahan, Miles Merrill, Tracey O’Callaghan, Steven Oliver & Joanna Yang

Writers’ Week’s favourite showcase of slam poetry and spoken word returns in 2023 with performances from poets striding the local, national and international stages. Among those joining us on the North Stage are Steven Oliver, Isi Ferguson, 2022 Slam Champion Joanna Yang and runner-up Anna McGahan, as well SA Champ Tracey O’Callaghan and founder of Australian Poetry Slam Miles Merrill. Join us for two enthralling hours of exhilarating and inspiring poetry.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 3:45pm on the North Stage

Poets include: Natalie Harkin, Colin Kinchela, Tyberius Larking, Luke Patterson, Latoya Aroha Rule and Ellen van Neerven

Join Dominic Guerrera and Alison Whittaker as they share everything that queer and trans First Nations poetry has to offer. Local and interstate poets from the NANGAMAY dream MANA gather DJURALI grow anthology will perform and yarn over their explosive and nourishing work. Poets include: Natalie Harkin, Colin Kinchela, Tyberius Larking, Luke Patterson, Latoya Aroha Rule and Ellen van Neerven.

Presented by Writers SA in partnership with BLACKBOOKS and Australian Poetry.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 2:30pm on the North Stage

Chair: Jill Jones

Julia Cimafiejeva is a Belarusian poet and translator now living in exile. Through poems that are intensely personal and political, she explores language and its limits. Cimafiejeva opens up about her childhood in a Chernobyl zone, her insistence on self-determination in a deeply authoritarian state and the despair and guilt she feels in fleeing.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 12pm on the North Stage

Chair: Felicity Plunkett

A conversation with Sarah Holland-Batt – poet, critic, editor and advocate for aged care – about her new collection. The Jaguar is a tender and fierce confrontation of mortality and grief, framed by elegies for the poet’s father, and imbued with the lyricism, force and energy that typify the work of this extraordinary poet.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 10:45am on the North Stage

Chair: Richard Buckham

“The world likes to trace the author’s life in the novel but the obvious isn’t always true. Something that was very close to you and resembles your experience isn’t necessarily the deepest version of the story… One feels for another person. One observes. One imagines.“ Literary biography is either portrait or autopsy according to one of the masters of the genre, Dame Hermione Lee. In Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, Brigitta Olubas is both coroner and portraitist. Meet the biographer as she reflects on Hazzard’s own sense of her life’s work, which included four novels, two short story collections, a peripatetic life, great friendships with other writers and a long marriage to an aesthete 25 years her senior.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 9:30am on the North Stage

Chair: Laura Tingle

Have we learned nothing from the tragedies, the waste of human life and the devastation endured during the 20th century? Our collective history contains many painful chapters – the two world wars, Hiroshima and Vietnam, to name just a few. The atrocities of war have persisted in the 21st century, as we see in the destruction in Ukraine, the price of years of conflict in the Middle East and the rise of autocrats. Anatol Lieven, Fintan O’Toole and Ben Macintyre reflect on why the international community has failed to learn the lessons of history.

Event details: Sun 05 Mar, 5pm on the West Stage