The Emerging Writers’ Festival launches its 2015 program with a game that puts you in the editor’s chair. How are written pieces deemed publishable? Do editors know what they’re doing? Is quality in the eye of the beholder?
As four guests from this year’s Emerging Writers’ Festival present their writing, it’s up to you to decide if the piece has previously been accepted or rejected for publication. Pick a side, and behold as the truth — and the Festival’s 2015 program — is finally revealed.
The Emerging Writers’ Festival promotes the interests of emerging writers – to improve their opportunities for professional development as well as their engagement with the broader public. Each year, EWF brings writers, editors, publishers and performers together with readers for a festival that is an essential part of Australia’s literary calendar.
Hosted by Emerging Writers’ Festival director Sam Twyford-Moore, with guests Jessica Yu, Oscar Schwartz, Amy Middleton and Chris Somerville.
The 2015 program will be available on the night – in print and online. Join the Emerging Writers' Festival for a drink to celebrate the launch of their programme at Thousand Pound Bend from 7.30pm.
Featuring
Sam Twyford-Moore
Sam Twyford-Moore is a writer and the founding host of The Rereaders, a fortnightly literary and cultural podcast. From 2012 until 2015, he was the Festival Director and CEO of the Emerging Writers’ Festival, during which time he directed three Melbourne-based festivals, launched the Digital Writers’ Festival and toured the festival to Hobart, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and across Indonesia. As a writer he has contributed to the Monthly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Australian, Meanjin, the Guardian, the Lifted Brow and others. He is the author of The Rapids: Ways of Looking at Mania published in August 2018.
Chris Somerville
Chris Somerville is the author of the short story collection We Are Not The Same Anymore. He is a former Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and his work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Paper Radio, Griffith Review and the Lifted Brow.
Amy Middleton
Amy Middleton is a Melbourne-based journalist and writer, who founded Archer Magazine, Australia’s first journal of sexual diversity, in 2013.
Archer is published twice-yearly by Amy and a small team, and its readership is growing at breakneck speed. Amy has written and edited for some of Australia’s most iconic magazines including Bulletin, Rolling Stone, Australian Geographic and The Big Issue.
Oscar Schwartz
Oscar Schwartz is a writer from Melbourne, Australia. He is interested in the intersections between digital technology and literature.
He tweets from @scarschwartz, blogs from botpoet.tumblr.com, and has a podcast: futurenowcast.com.
Jessica Yu
Jessica Yu (@jessicazmyu) is the recipient of the Young Writers Innovation Prize 2014 and founding editor of interactive narrativity website, Betanarratives. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Best Australian Poems 2014, Cordite, Mascara, the Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, the Saturday Paper, Award Winning Australian Writing and more. She is a 2015 recipient of a Grace Marion Glenfern Fellowship as well as a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk fellow.