Supporting authors and readers at festivals
March 8, 2019
Audiences at the recent Perth and Adelaide Writers’ Weeks heard from an incredible array of speakers, including several sessions supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
In Perth in late February, the sponsored panels were: Other Lives, Other Bodies – chaired by Copyright Agency CEO Adam Suckling – Sydneysiders and Aesthetics, Arguments & Anthills.
The Cultural Fund also once again sponsored the Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript, which was awarded to Tasmanian author and poet Angela Rockel for her manuscript Rogue Intensities: a politics of the imagination. Rogue Intensities is the first manuscript from Tasmania to win the $10,000 prize, following on from the novels Extinctions by Josephine WiIson and Drawing Sybylla by Odette Kelada, and the poetry collection Legacy by Julie Watts. Rogue Intensities will be published in October 2019.
In Adelaide, on 5 March, the funded panels were Writers on Writers, WTF Australia? – chaired by Adam Suckling – and Journeys and Place.
‘WTF Australia? How Australia’s politics let us down’ was one of the most well-attended sessions in Adelaide.
It featured three political heavyweights, award-winning author and former News Ltd journalist George Megalogenis whose most recent book is The Football Solution: How Richmond’s Premiership Can Save Australia (Viking); Crikey’s Bernard Keane – author of The Mess We’re In: how our politics went to hell and dragged us with it (Allen and Unwin) and The Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy, author of On Disruption (MUP).
In a very wide-ranging discussion, and with the Federal election in their sights, the panel explored Australia’s current addiction to changing political leaders despite relatively consistent economic indicators such as wage growth, low unemployment and low inflation.
The panellists also discussed the disruption of the media globally and whether that had contributed to the rise of Donald Trump, and whether or not Australia was in better shape than the UK or the USA.
Podcasts of certain sessions in Adelaide can be heard here.
Pictured below from left: Miles Franklin Award-winning authors Rodney Hall, Anna Funder and David Malouf, with Copyright Agency CEO Adam Suckling after their Perth Writers’ Week panel Other Lives, Other Bodies. Photo: Nicola Evans.
