Sydney Writers Festival program 2022
26 March 2022
The program for the 2022 Sydney Writers’ Festival was unveiled on Thursday, and refreshingly for the lockdown-fatigued is choke full of face-to-face, in person events. Spread across venues including Sydney Town Hall, City Recital Hall, and Carriageworks, the festival opens on Monday 16 May, and concludes on Sunday 22 May 2022.
In addition, numerous other “neighbourhood” events, will be held in other areas, both in and out of Sydney, hosted at places including the State Library of NSW, WestWords Parramatta, Ashfield Town Hall, Chatswood Library on The Concourse, Penrith City Library, and Wollongong Art Gallery. Top up your Opal card, you could be covering a bit of ground.
The opening night address takes place at Sydney Town Hall on the evening of Tuesday 17 May, and features Ali Cobby Eckermann, Jackie Huggins, and Nardi Simpson.
Nearly four hundred Australian and international authors and writers, along with actors, sports people, academics, and many others, are scheduled to participate in proceedings, including Emily Bitto, winner of the 2015 Stella Prize, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Mick Elliott, former Australian footballer Adam Goodes, Muireann Irish, Bri Lee, Charlotte McConaghy, J.P. Pomare, Teela Reid, Yumi Stynes, and Murong Xuecun, also known as Hao Qun.
The theme of this year’s festival, explains artistic director Michael Williams is change my mind. How perfectly apt, because what is writing, if not transformative?
Change my mind with a stanza or a couplet, a jarring dissonance, a beautiful echo or a rhyme. Change it with a flight of fancy, an intricate, imagined world, a compelling character I’ll never meet but never forget. Turn it upside down with searing rhetoric, impeccable research, the knock-out argument that has me questioning everything I know and all that I believe.
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Lauren Hough on novel plots free of conflict
24 March 2022
Writing in response to being removed from the nominations for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, for her collection of essays, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Berlin based author Lauren Hough highlights something I’ve been noticing a little recently: bizarrely, a dislike of conflicts in novel plots.
My book won’t win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry, and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn’t meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golding. They call it “call-out culture” because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don’t like, for social justice reasons, of course.
The problem of plots free of conflict isn’t restricted to “YA Twitter” though. Scanning through a range of book reviews on aggregator websites reveals a similar pattern. Readers will fault a novel if they find a character “unlikable”. Never mind said character’s unpleasantness is a crucial plot device, creating a challenge of some sort for a protagonist to overcome.
Others have stopped reading a book after learning a character is, say, engaged in an extra-marital affair. Sure, it’s behaviour not to be condoned, but it still happens, every day, all over the world, no doubt since people first walked the planet. Refusing to read a book where such an activity is occurring is surely akin to burying one’s head in the sand.
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The most prolific book reader and reviewer in the world
24 March 2022
From a Reddit post I stumbled upon this week, written in October 2018, by Scott Alexander. Read this, your eyes will water:
I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years. I thought it might be some bot account writing fake reviews in exchange for money, but if it is then it’s a really good bot because Grady Harp is a real person whose job matches that account’s description. And my skimming of some reviews looked like they were all relevant to the book, and he has the “verified purchase” tag on all of them, which also means he’s probably actually reading them.
I like to think I’m a somewhat avid book reader, but I could not — in a million years — come close to matching this sort of… output. Grady Harp, the subject of Alexander’s post, must read in a week what I do in a year. But we’re talking about reading and reviewing eight books daily. I know of some fast readers who can tackle a novel in a day, but this feat is truly incredible.
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New normal has become a longer term vibe shift
24 March 2022
Elamin Abdelmahmoud writing for BuzzFeed News, about what he refers to as “that funny feeling.” New normal was a term bandied about at the beginning of the COVID pandemic two years ago. At that point many of us took “new normal” to be a temporary state of affairs. But in light of other recent events, the Russian invasion of Ukraine for one, new normal is going to be ever changing, and far more permanent than some of us thought.
We are undergoing a colossal vibe shift that extends beyond taste, aesthetics, politics, fashion, or policy. The world as we knew it is not coming back, and it’s entirely reasonable that we may find ourselves plagued with a general restlessness, a vague notion of disorder. It’s that funny feeling.
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How the rings of Saturn were formed
23 March 2022
From BBC Earth Lab. Many millions of years ago, one of Saturn’s erstwhile moons, strayed a little too close, crossed a line, the Roche Limit, and shattered into billions of pieces, having been torn apart by the immense gravity of the Solar System’s second largest planet.
Saturn’s incredible ring system was the result of this cataclysmic event, once the remnants of the moon, some seventeen trillion tons of icy material, spread out in orbit around the planet. It would have been an incredible spectacle to witness, had anyone been around to see it all happen.
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The Tolkien Estate, a repository of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work
23 March 2022
The Tolkien Estate looks to be the ultimate resource of the work and life of British author, poet, and academic J. R. R. Tolkien, writer of The Lord of the Rings, and other works. It’s incredible to think — given the depth and scope of his writing output — that Tolkien worked mainly as a teacher at Oxford University, instead of a full time author.
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2022 Indie Book Awards winners
22 March 2022
Love Stories by Trent Dalton, and Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, are among the 2022 Indie Book Awards winners that were announced yesterday, Monday 21 March.
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2022 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) longlist
22 March 2022
The 2022 Australian Book Industry Awards longlist (ABIAs) was announced this afternoon.
It’s a big field, with close to one hundred contenders spread across twelve categories including New Writer of the Year, Small Publishers’ Children’s Book, International Book, General Non-fiction Book, and my personal favourite: Literary Fiction Book of the Year.
The Australian Book Industry Awards, or ABIAs, which were established in 2006, recognises the work “of authors and publishers in bringing Australian books to readers.” The shortlist will be released on Monday 23 May, with the winners being named at a ceremony on Thursday 9 June 2022 in Sydney.
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The Mysterious Disappearance of the Grosvenor, Paul Brennan
22 March 2022
The Summer Hill Grosvenor Theatre, was a grand old cinema that once stood in the inner west Sydney suburb of Summer Hill. The cinema opened in October 1930 and could seat over two-thousand people in its auditorium.
As a cinema though The Grosvenor had something of a chequered history, frequently changing ownership, and opening and closing on numerous occasions. For a short time between cinema operators, the building served as a warehouse. The Grosvenor finally closed as a film-house in 1969, and the building, after becoming dilapidated and vandalised, was demolished a few years later.
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Grosvenor is a documentary made by Australian cinema historian and film distributor Paul Brennan, and brings the The Grosvenor back to life though intricately rendered CGI recreations. It seems inconceivable today to sit in a room with two-thousand other people watching a film.
A short clip of Brennan’s work From Station to Door, offers a glimpse of a long vanished way of life, when a trip to the movies would have been an occasion, a night out on the town, even. This coming from someone who would rather stay at home and stream films.
The two closest classic art deco cinema experiences that come someway to replicating the scale of The Grosvenor that I can think of in Sydney would be the Ritz Cinema, in Randwick, and the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace, in Cremorne.
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From Anastasiia Lapatina in Mariupol, Ukraine
22 March 2022
Tweets don’t get much more poignant than this one from Anastasiia Lapatina, a journalist with The Kyiv Independent, who’s currently in Mariupol, Ukraine.
I am sure I will die soon. It is a matter of a few days. In this city, everyone is constantly waiting for death. I just want it not to be too scary. – testimony of a woman in #Mariupol
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