Adelaide Writers' Week

Sigrid Nunez took twenty-five years to become an overnight success with her seventh book, the National Book Award winning The Friend, the story of a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend with the help of a Great Dane. Its narrator returns in her new book, What Are You Going Through? with another intimate spare story in which she helps her friend prepare for the end after a cancer diagnosis. A beautiful meditation on friendship, mortality and grief infused with generosity and wit.

Chaired by Geordie Williamson

Robbie Arnott burst on to the literary scene with his gloriously imaginative debut, Flames, a novel of stylistic ingenuity that traversed genres with dense poetic prose. His new book The Rain Heron is similarly inventive, the story of a mythic bird with extraordinary powers, able to save and destroy the land, both hunted and protected by flawed humans. With lush lyrical language, The Rain Heron is at once ecological parable and thriller, and an audacious, immersive work from one of Australia’s most original new talents.

Chaired by Jane Howard

Two of our most incisive political analysts examine the state of leadership in Australia. Drawing on their recent Quarterly Essays, Laura Tingle (Follow the Leader – Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman QE71 and The High Road: What Australia Can Learn from New Zealand QE80) and Katharine Murphy (The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics QE79) explore whether #scottyfrommarketing offers more than photo opportunities, if Albo missed his moment, and what we want and should demand from those who would lead us.

Chaired by Sharon Davis

Even before we emerged blinking from Iso and the year that was 2020, we started to ask, “What Happens Next?”. Executive Director of Per Capita Emma Dawson coedited an anthology with this title, exploring how we can ensure we learn the right lessons from the COVID crisis. She is joined by Chief Economist of the Australia Institute Richard Denniss and Gideon Haigh, whose book, The Momentous, Uneventful Day: a Requiem for the Office looks at the implications 2020’s flight from the office has had on our working lives.

Chaired by Sharon Davis

Born of Louise Milligan’s own brutal experience as a witness in the Cardinal Pell case, Witness is at once a gripping, powerful, meticulously researched critique of our criminal justice system, and an eloquent and empathetic argument for change. Including the accounts of victims retraumatised by their courtroom experience alongside expert opinions and analysis from legal practitioners - including defence counsel, prosecutors, judges and academics - Witness lays bare the flaws of our adversarial system, and the devastating impact they can have on the delivery of justice.

Chaired by Natasha Cica

The message from Julia Gillard and her co-author, former Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to young female aspirants to public life in Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons is “Be aware, not beware!”. Containing interviews with eight impressive world leaders, including Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde and Jacinda Ardern, and drawing on the results of research and global surveys conducted by Julia’s London-based Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Women and Leadership provides an important and comprehensive analysis of the contemporary role of gender in access to and perceptions of leadership.

Chaired by Jo Dyer

Malcolm Knox and Jacqueline Maley are highly respected journalists, each a recipient of Australian journalism’s highest honour, the Walkley Award.  But beyond the world of reporting, each has chosen to mine their imagination to great effect. Now with six novels to his name, Malcolm’s latest is Bluebird, an incisive satire on the Australian Dream, set amongst sand and surf and broken dreams, that once again demonstrates his mastery of contemporary realism. Jacqueline’s acclaimed debut novel is The Truth About Her¸ another slice of social realism that deals with the fallout from the suicide of a wellness blogger following a hard hitting expose by an investigative journalist.

Chaired by Tali Lavi

Match wits with the Word Spy! Join the Australian Children’s Laureate for 2021, Ursula Dubosarsky (aka The Word Spy) for an entertaining quiz for children about the mysteries and wonders of WORDS and all things wordy. This is a recording, but... you can still play without cheating!

Colum McCann’s profoundly moving masterpiece, Apeirogon, is based on a true story of a friendship between “An Israeli, against the Occupation. A Palestinian, studying the Holocaust.” United by the devastation of losing a daughter to political violence, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan together tell their daughters’ stories over and over, to anyone that will listen, in an attempt to bring a peaceful resolution to the endless conflict. Colum’s radically empathetic novel is infused with both desperate hope and poetic power.

Chaired by Sophie Cunningham

Trent Dalton’s dazzling debut, Boy Swallows Universe, became the fastest selling Australian fiction debut ever, selling over half a million copies in Australia alone. His highly anticipated follow up, All Our Shimmering Skies, is set in Darwin in 1942 and is a sweeping mythological odyssey of love and adventure, magical and masterfully imaginative, populated by a Dickensian cast of finely drawn colourful characters, led by gravedigger’s daughter Molly Hook, a tenacious spirit as full of heart and hope as the novel she inhabits.

Chaired by Anton Enus