Adelaide Writers' Week

Chaired by Peter Goldsworthy

WARNING: CONTAINS REFERENCES TO SUICIDE.

The Silence Between Us: A Mother and Daughter's Conversation Through Suicide and Into Life is raw, courageous and devastatingly honest. A double memoir of mother and daughter Cécile and Oceane, it looks back nearly twenty years on Oceane’s suicide attempt at the age of eighteen. Compiled from contemporaneous diaries, letters, hospital records and psychiatric reports, the immediacy of the writing highlights the pain and confusion of the time and makes for confronting, necessary reading. Former Australian of the Year Pat McGorry joins Cécile and Oceane as they bravely break open the silence around suicide

Chaired by Anthony Durkin

1937. Seven-year-old Maxie falls into a rain-filled trench and drowns. From this tragedy emerges one of the High Court’s most engrossing cases and a landmark decision on the impact and import of inner suffering. The judge was ‘Doc’ Evatt – quick-witted, humane, brusque but flawed, a man who could brilliantly seize the moment but, like the dead brilliant Maxie, arguably fell short of his potential. A story of politics, pride, love, and an Australia growing into its skin, The Brilliant Boy is a dexterously handled slice of history by one of our finest – Gideon Haigh.

Chaired by Michael West

“Water policy is hard,” says Malcolm Turnbull, subject as it is to so many fiercely competing interests. Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells interviewed many of these interests for their book, Sold Down the River: How Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia’s Water Market. Opening the trade in water was supposed to make its allocation more efficient, but as the authors show, it has created a whole host of perverse outcomes. They demonstrate how we have failed to protect our most precious resource.

Chaired by Anton Enus

After the runaway success of her first two novels, Adelaide’s own Hannah Kent returns with Devotion, a story of the 19th Century Lutherans who migrated from Prussia to South Australia via a dangerous sea voyage. There are many types of love empathetically drawn – mothers and daughters, sibling and friends – but at the heart of the novel is the love story between narrator Hanne and her friend Thea. Hanne can hear nature’s music, and in this lush lyrical book, it becomes the poignant score to her great, majestic love.

Co-presented with Melbourne Writers' Festival

With its descriptions of the sophisticated economic and socio-political livelihoods of many First Nations’ communities, Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 multi-award-winning Dark Emu called for a reconsideration of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia. Confronting criticism from some who reject its portrayal of Aboriginal agriculturalists, and following the COVID-cancellation of their anticipated Melbourne Writers’ Festival session, Bruce and eminent historian Tom Griffiths (The Art of Time Travel) come together to consider the productive conversation emerging around Australia’s understanding of Aboriginal histories, and discuss the best way to deepen our shared knowledge of our nation’s vital first stories.

Chaired by Collette Snowden

The strong female protagonists in Jane Caro’s The Mother and Debra Oswald’s The Family Doctor take matters into their own hands. Debra’s Paula is a dedicated suburban GP, devastated by the murder of a friend and her children by their estranged husband and father. Jane’s Miriam is a successful businesswoman whose life is upended when her daughter’s marriage turns sour. These provocative, urgent novels brim with fury, grief and deep love as they explore what happens when you are tested to the limit, and ask when is it justified to fight fire with fire?

Chaired by Caroline Baum

From The Heather Blazing to The Master, Colm Tóibín is acclaimed for his skill at entering the mind of the writer. In The Magician, he turns his perspicacious eye to Thomas Mann. Outwardly genteel, inwardly tormented, cautious yet impatient, suspicious of the powerful but welcomed in their homes, Colm's Mann is a writer who withdraws from a world losing its sanity but finds himself dragged back into the mess of the times. Desire, exile, family – the themes are ambitious, but in Colm's deft hands, a superbly crafted epic has emerged.

Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs

As we lurch from one scandal of misspent public money to the next, transparency and accountability in public life have never seemed rarer. Fiona McLeod is Chair of the Accountability Round Table. Her book, Easy Lies and Influence, documents how community interests have been undermined. Through his fiercely independent news site, Michael West is known for following the money, highlighting those corporations exercising insidious power over our democracy. They ask: where have we gone wrong and what should we do now?

Chaired by Rick Sarre

This affirming book is less about death than how to counteract the fear of it and live a better life. Psychologists Rachel and Ross Menzies examine the many ways humans grapple with the dread of our demise, from the good, such as enduring art, to the bad, such as rampant consumerism and overpopulation. Insightful, illuminating and generous, Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Society gives us the tools to overcome the fear of our own mortality – death anxiety – to enjoy our life while we have it.

Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs

There is a price to be paid for convenience. The one-click wonder of Amazon comes at a cost. In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis sets out to explore what that cost is for the “America that fell in the company’s lengthening shadow”, namely the places where Amazon’s influence proved pernicious. Alec tells a chilling but utterly gripping dystopian tale of the pervasive destructive impact of Amazon on American life and many of its cities.