Writers festivals can be tedious affairs; opportunities for dusty literary types to gather around and listen to even dustier literary types spruik their most recent weighty tome. But Sydney Writers Festival is not like other such events. It never has been. From its conception, it has always been a literary event with a difference; a celebration of cutting edge, boundary pushing writers looking to expand the form and all of its potential.
That’s never been more clear than this year. Although the focus is on authors of fiction and non-fiction, the lineup also includes a viral star and academic (Robert E. Kelly, an expert on Korean relations who had his live BBC interview crashed last year by his two young children); one of the most acclaimed interviewers and political journalists in the country (Leigh Sales); a poet and author with few contemporary equals (Eileen Myles); a number of outstanding, form-challenging poets; and a “controversial”, AKA odious, columnist (Miranda Devine).
Indeed, the lineup is so overstuffed that it’s quite easy to get lost in all those names, and all those panels. For ease of access then, here are our picks of the festival; the writers and the events that shouldn’t be missed.
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, Her Body And Other Parties feels like one of those genuinely pivotal literary texts, a work that draws on a host of genre touchstones (most obviously the stories and novels of Alice Sheldon, Ray Bradbury, and Poppy Z. Brite) and uses them to synthesise something entirely new. A mix of weird fiction, feminist theory, and postmodern playfulness, it is vicious and vast; epic in scope and ambition, but carefully realised and precise too. These are familiar voices placed into unfamiliar mouths; recognisable horrors stretched to become new and freshly confronting. To read Maria Machado is to take a shortcut through a dark wood; to remember the fear and the fantasy of childhood; to become a young reader again, staying up late to read a book under the covers with a flashlight.
Machado is set to appear in conversation at the festival on Sunday May 6 at 3pm. She will be interviewed live onstage by Amelia Lush, celebrated member of the Australian literary community, making this an unmissable afternoon.
Emma Glass
Peach, the debut novel by Emma Glass, does what many might consider impossible: it takes a brutal story and tells it beautifully, with poetry and with light. Indeed, the book’s central dynamic – violence and assault translated into sentences full of internal rhymes, gorgeously rendered tangents, and trips of the tongue that recall Nabokov at his most inspired – make it a tricky, though admittedly short read. But as confronting as it might sometimes be, it is full of a kind of scraped, bleeding humanism; a deep understanding of failure. Quite simply, it has announced Glass as one of the most important writers of the last 20 years.
Glass is set to appear at the festival on Saturday May 5 at 10am. The event is free, and will be moderated by Abigail Ulman, the author behind the exceptional short story collection Hot Little Hands.
Emily Wilson
The Odyssey isn’t the most accessible book in the world. Although its key setpieces have become permanently engrained in pop culture consciousness, it is a difficult, meandering book. After all, it was designed to be spoken aloud rather than to be written down, and it has an odd kind of conversational quality to it. That strange, stop-start pacing is particularly alienating for modern audiences, many of whom have started a bad translation of the work only to be so bored by it that they never managed to muster the courage to pick it up again.
Enter Emily Wilson, the first female translator to ever work on the story. Her version retains the quirks and tangents that make Homer’s work so unique, but never gets bogged down in asides, or clunky phrasing. It’s an easy, endlessly entertaining read for modern audiences that draws out the adventure in the text – the sense of discovery and energy – while leaving behind the dustiness and dryness.
Wilson is set to appear at the festival on Sunday May 6 at 4:30 to talk about the work. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byrne, the host of ABC TV’s Book Club.
Jennifer Down
Jennifer Down is, simply put, one of the most exciting emerging writers in the country. Pulse Points, her recent collection of short stories, is full of a kind of gentle melancholy; that insistent sense of sadness that lurks about the edges of a lazy Sunday in the suburbs. Hers is a world of dignified, heartbroken partners; of fresh cut grass and fucked-up faces; of absolution lost and gained. They’re brisk, brief, but they linger the way all truly great stories do.
Down is appearing at two events at the festival. On Sunday May 6 at 11:30 am, she will deliver a talk on how to disappear; a lecture that will involve discussion of those who have faked their deaths, the impossibility of escaping the modern world, and the loneliness that drives people to turn in everything they’ve ever known so that they might start again. Then, at two pm on the same day, she will be talking audiences through Pulse Points, noting her influences, inspirations, and aims.
