Posts tagged 'events'

Our third and final programme of events for 2011 has something for everyone.

There are the big names, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jon Ronson (author of The Psychopath Test), journalist Kate Adie, Chinese dissident writer Liao Yiwu and former PM Paul Keating.

There are the stars of literary and genre fiction, like Elliot Perlman, Alex Miller, Di Morrissey and Matthew Reilly.

There are exciting one-off events like No One Understands Me, where guests including Marieke Hardy and the Bedroom Philosopher read from their angsty tomes.

There are new series like You Say You Want a Revolution, Sad/Angry/Happy and Law & Order Week.

And as always there are your favourite series, including Lunchbox/Soapbox, Intelligence Squared debates and a bunch of On the Road events in regional centres.

And that’s just for starters. Take a look at our programme and start filling your calendar with big names and bigger ideas now!

Things have quietened down at the Wheeler Centre as the Melbourne Writers Festival takes centre stage, but we’ll be releasing our third and final programme for 2011 after the festival – on the day of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards dinner, Tuesday, 6 September, which kicks off our ‘11 events in 11 days’.

Today we announced a bunch of events to tide us over until the full programme is announced early next month. Highlights include:

• a conversation on 7 September with Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s long-time partner, who’s been involved in a protracted dispute with the Larsson estate since the crime novelist’s death

• the resumption of the Lunchbox/Soapbox series with Christine Nixon speaking on leadership on 8 September, with journalist Paul Cleary taking up the baton the following Thursday (15 September), speaking on the pernicious effects of the mining boom

• Alan Ball, the screenwriter with the Midas touch and creator of American Beauty, Six Feet Under and True Blood, appearing on 10 September in conversation with Alan Brough

• noted Australian essayist Don Watson speaking on the tenth anniversary of his landmark political memoir, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart

• journalist Jay Bahadur on the cutthroat world of Somali piracy on 13 September

• US publishing phenomenon Anita Shreve on 14 September

• Rwandan genocide survivor Leah Chishugi on 17 September.

In support of the Wheeler Centre's Drawing Out, Drawing In: Spotlight on Graphic Novels event this weekend, Bernard Calleo blogs for Readings on Dylan Horrocks's graphic novel, Hicksville.

Also today in the Age, Kylie Northover talks to some of the presenters for this weekend's event.

Libraries are places where books talk to each other. But are their seductive whisperings in danger of being drowned out by the roar of phone-using, iPod wearing, internet surfing hordes?

This is an issue that has been debated openly in the Age and on the State Library of Victoria's website. Tomorrow Shane Maloney will reflect on the role of libraries in his experience as a reader and a writer, and speculate on their fate in the face of a culture with little regard for the values they embody.

Tomorrow at the Wheeler Centre, at 12:45pm, Catherine Deveny will be explaining 'Why Becoming an Atheist Made me a Writer (and Why Being a Writer Made me an Atheist)' at Lunchbox/ Soapbox, as part of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Book here.

Catherine Deveny

Presented by The Wheeler Centre with the Australian Poetry Centre, Ezra Bix, aka Professor Petri P Podsapoppin PhD, hosts the Fed Square Book Market this Saturday.

The New York Review of Books on Google's plan to digitalise millions of books, presages the Wheeler Centre's debate on the same subject.

Reading in a Time of Change

At Meanland: Reading in a Time of Change, Meanjin's Sophie Cunningham will chair a discussion focussing on how technology might alter the way we read and write in the future.