Melbourne Writers Festival program launches tomorrow

Yes, that’s right: the Melbourne Writers Festival program will be available in your copy of the Age tomorrow morning, or online at our website. You’ll be able to stop making your dream author wishlist and start compiling a real one.

The MWF team have been working tirelessly for months to put together a sublime 2011 program. Running for 11 days, the program boasts over 300 sessions and 400 guests, including some of the most exciting, most respected and most beloved writers the world has to offer.

If you feel like even a day is too long to wait, you can already check out our Schools Program online. Tickets for the 2011 Schools Program are already available; book in to see literary superstars ranging from acclaimed fiction writer Maile Meloy to local heroes Peter Goldsworthy and Steven Amsterdam taking residence in Federation Square haunts, ACMI cinemas, ArtPlay, the Wheeler Centre and the Immigration Museum.

We’re unbelievably excited – less than a month to go until our first events. You can expect some fabulous opportunities to eat with your favourite authors, discover literary Melbourne, and discuss the future of reading and writing. Whether you love fiction, journalism, poetry, graphic novels, crime, music … and more, or all the above, we think we’ve got you covered. And stay tuned for our Keynote Events: trust me, you’ll want to be there.

2009 MWF authors – 3 more

Teresa Solana

Three more authors, as announced in the last MWF e-bulletin:

Teresa Solana & Peter Bush

Husband and wife team, Teresa Solana and Peter Bush will be joining the festival from their home in Barcelona, Spain.

Teresa Solana is a Catalan crime writer of note with several books translated into English. The latest to be translated is A Not So Perfect Crime, a bitingly funny mystery novel with a backdrop of Catalan politics which won the 2007 Brigada 21 Prize. It is the first in a series that will feature twin brothers, Borja and Eduard, as private detectives with a knack for helping the wealthy and powerful with their ‘dirty laundry’. But a dead politician’s wife and the unpleasant stench of adultery stretches even their formidable skills.

A wonderfully ironic hymn to the city of Barcelona.
Diari de Balears

Peter Bush

Peter Bush is a renowned translator of literature from Catalan, French, Spanish and Portuguese and, no surprises, translates his wife’s crime fiction. He has also translated many other eminent writers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Juan Goytisolo, Leonadro Padura, Luis Sepúlveda and Chico Buarque. He edited The Voice of the Turtle, an anthology of Cuban stories. Peter was Professor of Literary Translation at the University of Middlesex and at the University of East Anglia, and has been director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Málaga, and has served the profession as vice-president of the Fédération Internationale.

Peter Goldsworthy

In Peter Goldsworthy’s latest novel, Everything I Knew, it’s the year 1964, and 14-year-old know-it-all Robbie Burns is about to discover he still has a lot to learn. The world is changing fast, although the news has yet to reach the small South Australian town of Penola. Poetry means the world to Robbie’s new teacher from the city, the stylish Miss Peach, a sixties sophisticate with stirrup pants, Kool cigarettes and a Vespa scooter. Miss Peach’s modern ways prove too much for the good people of Penola, but they fire Robbie’s precocious imagination and burgeoning sexuality, until what begins as a schoolboy fantasy has terrible, real consequences.

One of Australia most admired contemporary novelists, Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns and, after graduating in medicine he worked for many years in alcohol and drug rehabilitation. Since then, he has divided his time equally between writing and general practice. He has won major literary awards across a range of genres: poetry, short story, the novel, in opera and most recently in theatre. His previous novel Three Dog Night won the FAW Christina Stead Award and he wrote the libretti for the Richard Mills operas Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Batavia. Five of his novels are currently in development as movies, and two more for the stage.

Episodes of the most uproarious bedroom farce in Australian fiction and of individual tragedy. That he manages to move so surely between these modes is one of Goldsworthy’s triumphs.
Peter Pierce, The Sydney Morning Herald.