Sydney Writers' Festival program -- does it suck?



We had a great time at the Sydney Writers' Festival last year. Penny went through the program as soon as it was published and selected two full days plus big slabs of a couple of others for us to attend. I did exercise a degree of autonomy and go my own merry way -- to hear some poetry, mainly. In the event, separately and together, we had such a good time that when the Film Festival came around we just didn't bother. And it was months before we'd finished reading the little mountain of purchases -- if indeed we've finished yet.

So we both fell with cries of joy on the program for this year's festival, 18–24 May, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and online yesterday. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half a Yellow Sun), Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) and Christian Landers (Stuff White People Like) are coming from overseas. There are quite a number interesting looking sessions. The series of poetry readings looks set to be fabulous. But over all, very few things leap out (at least in this house) to say, 'Come and hear this!' Apart from the slightly disconcerting olive oil tastings and the like, I was put off by discussions of writers' lives (how winning the Booker changes your life; the effects of the Salman Rushdie fatwa) and 'the urgent need for new ways for the arts to connect with the community and secure stable funding'. They reminded me of those days in the early 1970s when we students would turn out in droves to listen to Frank Moorhouse, expecting him to read from Futility and Other Animals or something unpublishably scurrilous, only to have him drone on ... and on ... about Public Lending Right: of course PLR was and still is important, but what part of entertainment didn't he get? At the approaching festival, quite a few panels seem to be discussing issues with not a book or a reading in sight. As Wendy Were, Artistic Director, says on the web site, 'Reportage is a major theme, with many events exploring the modes in which we receive information.' Hmm.

There is a glimmer of hope. One event is described as featuring 'some of Australia's most revered writers'. That word 'revered' suggests that the problem may not be in the program itself but in the way its written up: if the copy writer thinks that festival goers approach their writers with reverence, perhaps they've misunderstood the program completely. Perhaps as in the past this festival will be about the pleasures of being read to, getting a taste of books not yet read and new looks at those already enjoyed, clapping eyes and ears on the people who have planted words and ideas in our heads.

Today, or soon, we'll go through the program in detail and I'm hoping that this first impression will turn out to be wrong wrong wrong. Any other Sydney-ites reading this: how does it look to you?

Posted: Sun - March 29, 2009 at 09:12 AM           |

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