Adelaide Writers' Week

Was 2020 a year of rupture that will change what we do with what we have? How will it impact on our ideas of access and abundance, of security and agency? How will it alter the way we think about resources – tangible and intangible; animal, vegetable, mineral, more? Contributors Nardi Simpson, Clare Wright and Gabrielle Chan explore new ideas of trade and exchange, sustainability and story, in Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance, in conversation with Editor Ashley Hay.

An Elon Musk-style billionaire persuades scientist Kate Larkin to join his secretive new project. Its ambitious aim is to re-engineer our collapsing climate by resurrecting long extinct species, including our closest human relatives, the Neanderthals. James Bradley’s Ghost Species is both a compulsive page-turner and book of big ideas: a deft examination of scientific, corporate and personal ethics in our endangered world and an intimate and affecting account of love, motherhood and what it means to be human.

Chaired by Nicole Abadee

Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning Hamnet gives us new and illuminating insight into Shakespeare and his masterpiece, and the family that nurtured him. Told from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife, this devastatingly beautiful novel takes as its starting point the true fact of the death of their 11 year old son, Hamnet (a variant on the more familiar Hamlet), and from there weaves a deeply moving story of family, love and, most profoundly, of grief, and the paths we must navigate through them.

Chaired by Anton Enus

Join a stellar lineup of South Australian First Nations writers Mandy Brown, Ali Cobby Eckerman, Natalie Harkin, Dominic Guerrera, Steven Pappin, Celestine Rowe, and MC Edoardo Crismani, and experience the depth and power of language in verse. With celebrated award-winning poets and some of the best emerging voices, First Words is an unmissable event in spoken word performance.

Presented by Writers SA

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the iconic City Series and the publication of updated versions on our eight capital cities, this special double event chaired by the infinitely expert George Megalogenis examines what makes each of our cities special through the eyes of authors who love and know them. As we emerge from the Great Lockdowns of 2020, when we were forced to stay home, and individual State borders slammed shut one after the other, it seems particularly appropriate to look at the personality of each capital – their skylines, cultures, architecture, and natural surrounds – and explore how they have changed over the last decade, and how they shape, excite, attract or infuriate their residents.

First we hear from Kerryn Goldsworthy (Adelaide), Sophie Cunningham (Melbourne), David Whish-Wilson (Perth) and Peter Timms (Hobart), and then Delia Falconer (Sydney), Matthew Condon (Brisbane), Paul Daley (Canberra) and Tess Lea (Darwin), before all authors return to the stage for questions from the audience and each other. Don’t miss this literary and cultural audit of the state of our cities, and their relationship to each other and the country.

Chaired by George Megalogenis

In this year’s lecture in memory of biographer Hazel Rowley, Jacqueline Kent, biographer of Vida Goldstein, Julia Gillard and Hephzibah Menuhin, turns the spotlight on herself and her brief but passionate relationship with Kenneth Cook, author of the novel Wake in Fright. Jacqueline discusses what happens when you become a character in your own story, and switch from describing others’ lives to tackle your own.

Megha Majumdar’s electric novel, A Burning, is the taut, riveting tale of three individuals whose lives become entangled in the aftermath of an horrific terrorist attack in Kolkata. Each have ambitions for themselves – Jivan, clawing her way out of the slum in which she lives, Lovely, the hijra intent on becoming a star, and PT Sir, a PE teacher who stumbles into right-wing political activism. But after a careless Facebook post, Jivan finds herself caught up in India’s corrupt legal system and her life hangs in the balance.

Chaired by Linda Jaivin

Compared by The New York Times to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Steinbeck’s mighty The Grapes of Wrath, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold? brilliantly reimagines both the American West and the Classic American Western. Longlisted for the Booker, it tells of Chinese American orphans Lucy and Sam’s quest through the Californian hills during the Gold Rush as they seek to bury the body of their father in a homeland that constantly tells them “this land is not your land.”

Chaired by Mirandi Riwoe

Join us for a session of exhilarating and inspiring spoken word performance showcasing poets invigorating our local and national stages, including Australian Slam Poetry Champions Ren Alessandra and Jesse Oliver, SA standout Slammers Chris Jaksa and Olenka Toroshenko plus Sarah Jane Justice, Hadley and Rameen Hayat.

Described by Richard Flanagan as the “best American novel I’ve read in years”, Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies combines memoir and essay, fact and fiction to deliver a tour de force.  How, his narrator asks, can he “express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art?”.  This powerful, courageous and extraordinarily timely work is his answer, exploring not just the state of contemporary America in the Trump era, and the relationship between East and West, but searing questions of identity, family and art.

Chaired by Ben Brooker