Keynote lecture: Bernard Avishai
Panel discussion: Geoffrey Levey, Arnold Zable, Bernard Avishai, and John Baker as Participating Chair
]]>Keynote lecture: Dipesh Chakrabarty
Panel discussion: Barry Hill, Sundhya Pahuja, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Justice Susan Crennan as Participating Chair
]]>Panel Discussion: Tariq Modood, Asma Barlas, Susan Neiman, and Shakira Hussein as Participating Chair
]]>Keynote lecture: Susan Neiman
]]>Keynote lecture: Asma Barlas
]]>Keynote lecture: Tariq Modood
]]>Keynote lecture: Stanley Hauerwas
Panel discussion: Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier, Kristina Keneally, Stanley Hauerwas, and Morag Fraser as Participating Chair
]]>Keynote lecture: Raimond Gaita
Panel discussion: Raimond Gaita, Scott Stephens, Asma Barlas, Susan Neiman, and Bernadette Tobin as Participating Chair
]]>Masha Gessen is the author of a controversial new biography of Putin, The Man Without a Face. She has also written extensively on the lives and roles of women in contemporary Russia. Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls looks at the lives of Chinese women making their way from rural villages to modern metropolises, navigating China’s seemingly insatiable economy.
Two bold women from countries which have experienced enormous social change share their thoughts on women, power, and how their writing sheds light on their respective fascinating homelands.
]]>Some writers – and readers – like to play it safe. Others test the cutting edge of literature, defying conventional wisdom to invent new genres or dare to follow their obsessions. Chad Harbach has written a sprawling sports novel in the style of Franzen, while Jeanette Winterson threw the literary playbook out the window long ago.
Literary young man Chad Harbach (an editor at Brooklyn lit-mag n+1) has hit a home-run with his first novel, The Art of Fielding. Ostensibly about an unlikely baseball star in a liberal arts college, this big American novel is also about male friendship and team spirit, written in the intelligent, addictive prose style of Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers. The Art of Fielding is a book about baseball in the same way that Moby Dick (Harbach’s inspiration) is a book about a whale – absolutely and not at all.
Chad spent ten years working on The Art of Fielding; he was unemployed when it sold (for $665,000) in what Vanity Fair called ‘the biggest fiction auction in recent memory’. ‘Until then I’d been living hand to mouth,’ he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kukatani called The Art of Fielding ‘a magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer’.
For Jeanette Winterson, truth is just as strange as fiction. Her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, borrowed from her Pentecostal upbringing, and the eccentric tyrant mother who tried to exorcise her after she fell for a girl. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? revisits this fertile territory under the mantle of memoir. But Winterson is no fan of realism: her stories are playful and inventive, resisting the boundaries of both sexuality and genre – and revelling in the pure sensuality of language.
Talking to Salon about her frustration with the constrictions of genre, Winterson says she prefers to call her latest book a ‘cover version’ rather than a memoir. ‘If I want to use myself as a fictional character, why can’t I? … Paul Auster, Henry Miller, Milan Kundera, any of those writers who quote themselves directly, Philip Roth, for God’s sake! We all say, “That’s so great! That’s so interesting!” But if you do that as a woman, it becomes confessional and autobiographical.’
Chad Harbach will be joined in conversation by Jenny Niven.
]]>What could be better on a cold winter’s night than curling up in a nice intimate spot to hear some of your favourite writers spin a tale? This winter we present three nights of storytelling in The Moat, featuring three stories each night from the best talents in town. All you have to do is turn up, wrap yourself around a warming beverage, picture an open fire and let yourself be carried away on a wave of imagination.
Our story begins with three chilly travel tales with a twist, all set in a cold climate. Brr!
Featuring George Dunford, Meg Mundell and Paddy O'Reilly. Curated and presented by Chris Flynn.
]]>In this globalised world, we’re increasingly drawn to stories from other places; tales that immerse us in faraway cultures. And where better to find our stories than in fellow UNESCO Cities of Literature, Reykjavik and Dublin? Icelander Sjón and Irishman Roddy Doyle each draw inspiration from the local, transforming the lives and literature of their native cities into stories that take place on the page, the screen – and through music.
Icelandic author Sjón is a rock ‘n’ roll renaissance man. He writes poetry, pens lyrics for Björk, wrote a whale-watching ‘splatter film’, and won the Nordic equivalent of the Man Booker for his novel The Blue Fox. His latest novel, From the Mouth of the Whale, has just been shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His passion is melding ancient Icelandic traditions with the avant garde, mixing ‘myths and crackpot theories together with my need to tell a story’. A.S. Byatt has called him ‘an extraordinary and original writer’.
A former ‘neo-surrealist’ who started his career as a poet aged just 15, Sjón was nominated for an Oscar for ‘I’ve Seen it All’, the song he co-wrote for Dancer in the Dark with Lars von Trier and long-time collaborator Bjork. He is on the board of the Bad Taste (Smekkleysa) record label and a member of the advisory board for Kraumur Music Fund, which aims ‘to strengthen Icelandic musical life, primarily by supporting young musicians in performing and presenting their works’. He is currently adapting his novel The Whispering Muse for the opera and completing his eighth novel.
When Roddy Doyle self-published his first novel, The Commitments, in 1987, he was told he’d struggle to attract readers beyond Dublin. Decades later – after a Booker Prize (for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha), numerous novels, two films based on his books, and several screenplays – he’s gone from cult hero to cornerstone of the Irish literary establishment. And while his fan-base is worldwide, Ireland remains at the heart of his art.
Roddy’s latest novel, The Dead Republic, closes a trilogy on twentieth-century Ireland, told through the colourful life of IRA man Henry Smart. Talking about the first novel, A Star Called Henry, in 1999, he said, ‘I wanted to make sure that Henry wasn’t an evil character because I think that’s too easy and lazy … if Henry had been born in a more sedentary, more solidly working-class environment, rather than that underclass environment, he’d have had a perfectly normal life like the rest of us.’
Inspired by his friend Dave Eggers, Roddy founded Fighting Words, a creative writing workshop for children based in Ireland, in 1999. He is a frequent presence there, along with neighbour Anne Enright.
]]>Who says science is dominated by men? Well, it might be, but these two remarkable women – Barbara Arrowsmith-Young and Dava Sobel – are at the top of their fields. Barbara Arrowsmith-Young recognised the potential of neuroplasticity – the ability to rewire the brain – long before it became the latest hot concept. And Dava Sobel’s writing brings scientific discovery thrillingly to life: her readers come for the stories and stay for the science.
Dava Sobel has always been fascinated by science and the stars. A former science reporter for the New York Times, she became a publishing supernova in 1995 with the publication of her page-turning popular science bestseller, Longitude. Her fourth book, A More Perfect Heaven, blends narrative history, science and the techniques of drama to tell the story of a theory that literally reversed the way we see the world: Copernicus’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun.
Dava says she is drawn to astronomy ‘because I love the big questions. Astronomy asks some very big questions, and I’m drawn to it for that, and also just the beauty of it.’
She has wanted to write about Copernicus since even before Longitude: ‘He’s the person who turned the universe inside out, and I’ve been interested in him forever.’
Barbara Arrowsmith-Young turned her life-defining learning disabilities into an unlikely asset. Unable to process language or decode symbols, she compensated with her fierce determination to learn, fuelled by a formidable memory. In graduate school, she chanced on research that held the key to reprogramming her own brain. This was in the 1970s and 80s, before neuroplasticity became a widely accepted fact. Her pioneering Arrowsmith Program has since helped countless children and adults with learning disabilities to unlock their potential.
‘In most traditional special education programs, the premise is that the learner’s fixed. The learner is the learner, with their strengths and weaknesses,’ says Barbara. ‘The premise of our work is, we’re going to take this learner, and we’re going to change the capacity of the learner.’
Norman Doidge shared Barbara’s story in his bestseller The Brain That Changes Itself; she speaks for herself in her new book, The Woman Who Changed Her Brain.
]]>The arts aren’t immune to their own kind of sexism. So let’s talk about it. What can current generations of feminists learn? What’s different and what sticks? How are our public and media figures affected by expectations of women’s role? And how can art contribute to political change?
Hosted by Joint Artistic Director, Fierce Festival: Laura McDermott
Next Wave Artists: Alice Lang, Courtney Coombs and Rachael Haynes (Food for Thought), Atlanta Eke (Monster Body)
International speaker: Ianto Ware Guest speakers: Sophie Cunningham
With LEVEL Artist Run Initiative.
]]>As a teenager, Christopher Paolini fell hard for fantasy. He read all he could find in his local library – and when that ran dry, he started to write his own stories. The tale of his first book, Eragon, written when he was just 15, is publishing legend. Originally self-published by his family, the story about a boy who hatches his own pet dragon went on to be a worldwide bestseller.
Last year, the fourth and final book in the Inheritance series, Inheritance, was published. The first three books have sold 25 million copies. What next? Paolini says he might turn his hand to sci-fi…
]]>Join the Emerging Writers' Festival and editor Karen Pickering for the book launch of The Emerging Writer, an insider’s guide to navigating the writing world. This event will include the presentation of the Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 2012.
]]>There’s a certain appeal to stories that keep us guessing; that take us beneath the surface to explore subterranean intrigue. Secrets and lies, betrayal and espionage: these are the tools perfectly wielded by Hisham Matar, who explores his father’s political kidnapping in his fiction, and spy novelist extraordinaire Stella Rimington.
Stella Rimington is the latest in a literary club that boasts the likes of Graeme Greene and John Le Carre as members: spooks turned spy novelists. Dubbed ‘housewife superspy’ when she was appointed director general of MI5, she was the first woman in the world to lead a major spy agency. Liz Carlyle, the intelligence officer heroine of her six novels, brings spy-lit up to date, out-thinking her enemies rather than shooting them. Her latest is Rip Tide, an adventure involving Somali pirates and Islamic terrorists.
‘The intelligence service of John Le Carre’s Cold War books really is quite reminiscent of the MI5 I joined,’ she told Kerry O’Brien on her last visit to Australia, in 2009. Rimington says that intelligence work is nothing like a James Bond adventure; she never used a gun in her time at MI5.
The agency still vets her novels to ensure she’s not giving away state secrets; which is somewhat ironic, given that they ‘outed’ her with little warning on her appointment to the top job. She had to move house after the media found her address; the IRA was still active in London at the time. She says it’s the only time she really felt her life was in danger.
Born to Libyan parents in New York, growing up between Tripoli and Cairo, Hisham Matar is perfectly placed to translate the tumult behind the Arab Spring to western readers. His perceptive, multi-layered novels evoke the knife-edge vulnerability of life under dictatorship – and in exile. Matar’s father, a Libyan dissident, was kidnapped and imprisoned in 1990; he is counted as one of Libya’s ‘disappeared’. This tragedy is at the heart of both Matar’s novels: the Booker-shortlisted In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance.
In an interview with NPR last year, he said, ‘I wanted to try to make something hopefully beautiful from this … being able to sing about the terrible things to me is an act of resistance. It is a way to say I will make art even out of this’.
Since the death of Qaddafi in 2011, Hisham has been a much-sought-after commentator on the country of his birth; he answered reader questions on the subject of Libya’s future for the New Yorker last year.
Hisham Matar appears with the support of British Council.
]]>Join us to celebrate the launch of the fabulous Emerging Writers' Festival program 2012. Three writers from a wide range of genres discuss the art of storytelling, and how they create compelling narrative whether they’re building new sci-fi worlds or surreptitiously drawing patrons at the NGV. Chaired by Triple R’s Ben Birchall, and featuring highlights of the EWF Program from director Lisa Dempster, this event also features Oslo Davis, Mel Campbell and Max Barry.
]]>From the moment French/Spanish bass wunderkind Renaud Garcia–Fons first held a double bass in his hands at age 16, the future of the instrument was destined to change.
]]>Three-time Grammy Awardwinner Antonio Sanchez is ‘one of the standout jazz drummers on the contemporary scene’ (New York Times).
]]>