Adelaide Writers' Week

Part memoir, part love letter to her favourite books and authors, Tegan Bennett Daylight’s first collection of essays, The Details: On Love, Death and Reading, evokes Blake’s observation that one can see “a World in a Grain of Sand.” The detail is the point, she writes. Drawing on noted authors including Jane Austen, George Saunders, S. J. Perelman and particularly Helen Garner, Tegan skillfully blends observations about writing and reading with recollections from her own life, from the profound to the everyday, to moving, inspiring and sometimes hilarious effect.

Chaired by Geordie Williamson

Why is it that, despite overwhelming popular support for action on Climate Change, Australia has been a policy laggard in this area? One of Australia’s most respected investigative journalists Marian Wilkinson tells all in The Carbon Club. Revealing the network of powerful climate change sceptics, politicians and business leaders who have sought to control Australia’s climate policy, and with extraordinary access to players from all sides, Marian has written a riveting and disturbing account of the self-interest and betrayal behind Australia’s criminally poor response to Climate Change.

Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs

The man who invented “cyberspace”, William Gibson is one of the most influential writers of our time. From his groundbreaking debut novel Neuromancer, to his latest bestseller Agency, he was the first to imagine a computer-saturated existence, grounded in an all-too-material world, and to anticipate its implications. The philosophies and practicalities of the near futures of his books stem from a deep and fascinated engagement with the present, as embodied in his most famous aphorism: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Chaired by James Bradley

Soldier-scholar David Kilcullen is Australia’s most influential contemporary military strategist. A former adviser to General Petraeus and former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his new book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, examines the complex new world of modern warfare, featuring the state competitor “dragons” and the non-state guerrilla and terrorist players, the “snakes.” A remarkable synthesis of three decades of military and political history, this expert analysis of the new nature of conflict is as illuminating as it is disturbing.

Chaired by Rick Sarre

When should you choose self-publication over publication? What does a self-publishing writer need to know about production, printing, design, promotion and distribution – and which path is right for you? Get the nuts and bolts of self-publication with Deborah Lee of Ingram Spark and author Maria Lewis, who has both self-published and been commissioned by a major publishing house.

Hosted by Georgia Richter

In Richard Fidler’s love letter to the city of Prague, The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague, he describes it as a city “written in pencil, erased, rewritten and erased again... a fabulous palimpsest of stories.” Richard interweaves his own visits, experiences and impressions of Prague with its broader history, giving us a brilliant living portrait of a city of fairy tales, violent crusades and dark secrets. His passion and love for the city infuse the pages of a book that captures its very essence.

Chaired by David Sly

Royce Kurmelovs’ finances were shredded when, uninsured, he hit another car. Rick Morton grew up in poverty, a household that struggled to afford birthday gifts and in which an unexpected bill could mean a choice between food and electricity. Royce’s Just Money: Misadventures in the Great Australian Debt Trap and Rick’s On Money are illuminating explorations of the debt industry and its shakedown of the poor and the desperate, and the strange moral meaning we – one of the most indebted nations in the world – ascribe to both the having and owing of money.

Chaired by David Sly

Emily St. John Mandel’s exquisite new novel tells of the porous boundaries between past and present, rich and poor, living and dead. The Glass Hotel follows tough and beautiful Vincent, whose fall off a container ship into a storm-tossed ocean opens and closes the book, and of Jonathan, who whisks Vincent off into the “kingdom of money”, but whose wealth is a Bernie Madoff-esque mirage. With its intricate, interlocking narratives, and rich haunting prose, The Glass Hotel is a beguiling puzzle of a book that is a joy to solve.

Chaired by Caroline Baum

Hugh Mackay has made a lifelong study of the attitudes and behaviours of Australians, researching who we are, and why we behave as we do, for nearly sixty years. In his potent new book, The Inner Self, Hugh returns to his psychology roots and turns his gaze inwards, bypassing our socially constructed identities to explore our deeper, more private sense of self. He invites us to find a path to psychological freedom by answering that most challenging and confronting of questions: Who am I, really?

Chaired by Nicole Abadee

When his father died unexpectedly at 59, Christopher Pyne learned that life is short in the toughest possible way. He became a man in a hurry, and fought his way into Federal Parliament at the tender age of 25, knifing his erstwhile mentor to get there. A confidante to and tactician for multiple Prime Ministers, Christopher rose to become one of SA’s most powerful – and entertaining – political figures. In The Insider: The Scoops, the Scandals and the Serious Business within the Canberra Bubble, he writes with verve, wit and candour about what Annabel Crabb calls “a truly bonkers period of political history.”

Chaired by Sally Warhaft