It’s a booksy life

As you might imagine, we get a hell of a lot of books arriving in the office. In the lead up to the festival publishers send through newly released titles and proof books with their heavy paper and plain covers as one of the ways to spruik the fabulous writers under their wings. Some of the writers end up as guests of the festival; many of them don’t. But it’s such an exciting moment when new packages arrive. It’s like Christmas, but delivered by courier!

I’m still lagging a bit when it comes to my reading list but I’ve managed both China Miéville‘s The City and The City and Scott Westerfeld‘s Last Days, both guests of the festival this year. I’m not sure I’ll have much free time over the first weekend but if I can squeeze it in I’ll be at their sessions with bells on (I’ll probably forgo the pointed shoes though). Miéville has a touch for alternate worlds, layers on layers of shared but separated experience. It’s not too far from own world really.

I’m a geek at heart. I’ve snagged copies of Carrie Ryan‘s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (so spooky I still have it half-read and facing down beside my bed), Megan Abbott‘s The Song is You (for its irresistible pulp cover by artist Richie Fahey), and I’m hoping to convince Steve that surely he wants to pass Ryu Murakami‘s Audition my way, because sharing is just like a big hug. There won’t be much time for reading over the next two months (busy busy whoosh!), but I’ll squeeze in what I can.

Louise
Festival Administrator

Wrapping up one week to start another…

Taking a break at the end of another weekend slog. This is the part of the process where I have to dot my ‘i’s and cross my ‘t’s – go through every panel (all 308 of them) and make sure there is balance and energy and a good chair. I’ve had an email conversation today with Michael McGirr who most people will remember for his gentle and witty memoir about travelling with his mother, Things You Get For Free.  Michael will join us at the festival to talk about his new book, The Lost Art of Sleep which continues his personal journey while exploring all things sleep related. Warmly engaging, erudite and delightfully personal – it won’t help cure your insomnia but it will certainly explain it. I got a buzz as one of his interviewees is Geraldine Moses, a Brisbane doctor and old school friend. He also remembers one of my Brisbane Writers Festivals with great warmth because his twins were conceived there!

It is thrilling when the right combination of panellists come together. And sometimes in a way that is surprising. Yesterday I was following up a lead for a speaker on trauma for a panel, After the bushfires and the psychologist I was pursuing also turned out to be not just a child Holocaust survivor but he had studied and written about children who survived the Holocaust too.  So I immediately asked him to do a session with Judge Thomas Buergenthal.

There is also frustration – my beautiful combinations morph from one combination to another as potential chairs reply “moving to Sydney”, “will be overseas” and then – another pot of gold in my in-box. This time Paddy O’Reilly gets back to me from Tokyo saying yes, she’d love to interview Hitomi Kanehara. Paddy’s first novel, The Factory, was written in Japan on an Asialink grant and she is a great fan of Hitomi’s work. I’ve been pursuing Hitomi for awhile as I’m intrigued by her novels. She is a media superstar in Japan and still only in her mid-20s. She is bringing her husband and small baby with her which explains why travel has been off the menu for a while. (Heidi Julavits is travelling with her baby too – we need a creche!). Hitomi wrote her first novel before she was even 20 and it won the most prominent Japanese literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 2004. One of the judges, celebrated writer Ryu Murakami, said her book was ‘easily the top choice, receiving the highest marks of any work since I became a member of the selection panel’. The original Japanese edition of Snakes and Earrings has since topped bestseller lists and sold over a million copies, and translated into 28 languages. Snakes and Earrings is, in the best Japanese tradition, a dark tale of sex and violence.

Speaking of sex and violence, our Danny Katz donation campaign has been wildly successful which is a shame – I was looking forward to Danny & Shane Maloney doing a nude reading in a paddling pool full of gravy. The media have picked up on Danny’s fabulous letter (see it on our website if you haven’t already) giving the campaign extra life. If a few more people donate we will reach our goal by the end of June (the end of the financial year for those looking for a good tax-deduction).

We hand the program to The Age this Friday so as we tick off panels we lock them away in template documents which eventually become the printed program. We are radically changing the way the program looks this year, We’ve made many improvements to its readability over the last few years but people new to the festival are often overwhelmed by the sheer number of events and authors. So we want to find a way of presenting the masses of print-heavy information in a clearer, more graphic fashion. With more cross-referencing and using the website as a repository for more detailed information like author biographies. It has been an interesting experiment involving many designers, many templates, many focus groups, many dead ends and we think we’ve come up with something splendid. The Age have also agreed to increase the size of the program from 24 to 28 pages which will make a vast difference.

Back to work – I still have half a dozen invitations to chair panels to send out tonight before I go home and check on my increasingly independent children.

Goodnight!

Rosemary
Festival Director

On the go?

Hi again,

I’ll try and make sense, even though I’m sharing a ’12 things on the go’ moment with (pretty much) all my colleagues. The festival is hotting up – authors, events and ideas about the ways these two intersect are moving around us at an ungainly speed. It’s fun, but it’s all becoming a little bit of a blur (in a fun way though, pretty much like doing ‘wizzies’ when you were a kid).

Every time my eyes refocus I turn them to a new book. I’ve just started Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency, a Booker nominee and, at this early stage of my reading I can understand why; the language is beautiful, loaded and large, but still light and erudite (if that’s all possible). I’m only 100 pages in and I’ve met almost 20 characters … an ‘epic portrait’ indeed. I already feel like I’d be at home in any of the local pubs (in one of the corners of 1970s Sheffield).

Prior to this I’ve read Ryu Murakami’s Audition, a short book about a middle-aged man who chances upon the most unique way of finding a second wife … by creating a fake film project which a range of women audition for. I was, after much of what I’ve read about this book, expecting something far more violent. This wasn’t really the case. There is a sense of unease that’s sustained through much of the latter part of the book and it only gets a little gruesome at the end. I look forward to seeing the film version (although I’m a little concerned about the affect on me, seeing the ‘Critical response‘ section of the Wiki page).

I also read Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (Sleepers Publishing). I’m not going to be able to do this book justice in this short blog, but I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting spec-fiction and also got something that reminded me of David Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas I loved. Amsterdam’s book follows one main character through a series of episodes in a post-Y2K world … a world that’s gone totally awry, and a world that could very possibly be ours in the too-soon future (Y2K aside). It’s believable, and there’s room in the spaces to let the reader bring their own thoughts to the table.

I’d better go now, given I’m still in the middle of a ’11 things on the go’ moment.

Regards

Steve
Associate Director